


Temptation Waits

by jessthereckless



Series: It's Not The End Of The World, Dear [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 17th Century, Aziraphale is Bad at Being an Angel (Good Omens), Background Character Death, Crowley is Bad at Being a Demon (Good Omens), Dirty Talk, F/M, Female Crowley (Good Omens), Fluff and Smut, Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), Historical References, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Pining, Porn with Feelings, Witchcraft, beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly, crap sex roleplay, eldritch service topping, extremely regrettable sex, floating legless witch dogs, metaphysical erectile dysfunction, they see me floatin they hatin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-09-23 23:34:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20348647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessthereckless/pseuds/jessthereckless
Summary: Back in the tumultuous days of the English Civil Wars, against a backdrop of witchcrazed imaginations and strange Cromwellian tabloids, Aziraphale made a proposal to Crowley. He wanted Crowley to teach him the art of Temptation.In the present, Aziraphale makes another proposal, one that reminds Crowley of the Incident in 1649 and confirms once and for all that Anthony J. Crowley is a truly rubbish sex demon.Can be read as part of a series or a standalone. Title is from the song by Garbage.





	1. Chapter 1

Humans wrote all kind of songs about being loved by or falling in love with angels, but Crowley didn’t think any of them were even slightly close to the mark. 

For example, none of the love songs covered certain experiences which – Crowley had to admit – were specific to this particular angel. Like the way the angel giggled when you gently sank your teeth into the flesh of his inner thigh, or the two fat, cherubic dimples at the top of his arse, the ones that made it look as though God had sculpted his bottom by hand and left two fond thumbprints behind. 

Neither did any of the songs cover exactly how strange angels could be. 

In settling in London, Aziraphale had unerringly picked a country where his long fed eccentricities could pass without comment. There were still things even Crowley didn’t quite understand about Aziraphale, like why he owned a vacuum cleaner. Here was a being who could sit still for so long that he _personally_ gathered dust, and yet he had a fully stocked broom cupboard, complete with a red Henry hoover and a collection of brushes. Crowley had no idea why he even bothered. Sometimes Aziraphale would come downstairs with a purposeful expression and a feather duster, but after a couple of sour-faced passes over the bookshelves he’d find something interesting that he hadn’t read for over a century and leave the feather duster abandoned where it had fallen. 

Crowley suspected it was all part of the constant push and pull of the angel’s nature – the reluctant thrust of Should and the lazy lure of Is. Aziraphale _should_ have been scrupulously tidy and correct, but in reality was locked in a constant losing battle with his inner slob, who just wanted to read a good book while dropping biscuit crumbs all over his cardigan. Aziraphale should have been the model of ascetic, angelic virtue, but with familiarity came even more revelations about how hopelessly, hilariously unsuited he had always been for such a role. 

Like the barber, for example. 

That had been another mystery. If Crowley wanted to change his hair he changed it, and he’d assumed Aziraphale could do the same. Not that Aziraphale did. He’d worn his curls in the same tidy crop for the past six thousand years. 

As it turned out, it had never been about the haircut. It had been about the gossip, the custom colognes, the wet shaves and hot towels. Yet another pleasure of the flesh that he had not only succumbed to but actively lathered in. “You really should try it sometime,” Aziraphale would say, whenever he returned from one of his regular pamperings. Then he would offer up a fragrant cheek with the texture of fine velvet and insist there was nothing, my dear, that compared to the pleasure of a professional wet shave. 

Then there was the sex. 

Not even Crowley’s filthiest sexual fantasies had quite prepared him for the full force of an angel’s libido. Aziraphale was – by turns, and sometimes all at once – adoring, curious, insatiable and more or less completely shameless. Occasionally Crowley could come up with something that would provoke a blush, but then Aziraphale would usually mutter something about consenting adults and get on with figuring out what bit went where and how hard and fast he could make Crowley come. 

“Darling, you _know_ what Soho used to be like,” Aziraphale said, one night when they were lounging in the burnished, Art Deco elegance of the Savoy Grill. “It was all buttplugs and blow up dolls. Used to have all sorts wandering in and out of my bookshop, looking for pornography.” 

“Did they ever find any?” 

“Sometimes, yes. Let’s face it, it’s not a real second hand bookshop without at least a couple of well-loved copies of _Fanny Hill_ lurking in the back room somewhere.” Aziraphale’s smile somehow managed to be both wistful and naughty at the same time. “The old ‘plenipotentiary instrument’ still manages to make me giggle. Cleland had such a way with words.” 

“Plenipotentiary…?” 

“Cock, dear.” 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Crowley, digging into his steak tartare. “It’s just hard to picture, that’s all.” 

Aziraphale blinked. “Picture _what_, exactly?” 

“You. Reading dirty books. I know you do, but it’s still weird.” 

“Why would it be weird?” 

“I don’t know. You’re…you’re…” Crowley shook his head, not completely sure what he was trying to articulate here. After all, it wasn’t like he _should_ have had any trouble seeing Aziraphale as a sexual being. Aziraphale had fucked his brains out in so many different ways that it was a miracle he could still remember how to talk, but still… “I don’t know, okay? It’s like…you still come across as very prim and proper sometimes.” 

“Is that a problem?” 

“No. No. It’s actually very sexy, but it’s also weird. Because it’s you. And because I’m used to you, but I’m not used to you being this…” Oh shit. This was going badly. Aziraphale’s arched eyebrows had settled at an angle that meant he was quietly taking offense at everything. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re an _angel_.” 

“Obviously,” said Aziraphale. 

“Yeah, well, you see? That’s it.” 

“No, I don’t see at all. That’s what, exactly?” 

“Look,” said Crowley, floundering. “You are…you are an incredibly uninhibited lover, okay? I was totally unprepared for the degree to which you would drop your drawers and get freaky.” 

“I see,” said Aziraphale, at his most glacial. “Because I’m still the same podgy, stodgy, prim and proper, starchy little angel. Is that it?” He set down his fork and blotted his cupid’s bow mouth with the napkin. 

“There,” said Crowley, seizing his inspiration. “You see? That. The way you eat.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’ve seen you wipe your cheek with your fingers and lick them clean. It’s that difference between the old you and the…the filthy, sexy beast you are in bed.” Crowley took a breath, relieved to see signs of a thaw. “It’s kind of a mindfuck.” 

Aziraphale’s lips curved in a smile. “I’m a mindfuck now? Is that a good thing, I wonder?” 

“It’s a good thing,” said Crowley, back on safe ground. “It’s a very sexy thing. Trust me.” He took Aziraphale’s hand and kissed the knuckles, peering up over the edges of his sunglasses. 

Aziraphale turned pink and giggled, back to his usual coquettish self. “How’s the steak tartare?” 

“Delicious. How’s the crab salad?” 

“Exquisite.” 

They traded bites. “You know, if it’s a mindfuck you’re after…” said Aziraphale, toying with a green olive on the side of his plate. He picked it up with his fingers and offered it to Crowley, his eyes glittering. Crowley laughed and shook his head. 

Aziraphale tutted and ate the olive. “I could, you know,” he said, his knee grinding against Crowley’s beneath the table. “I could make you come right here and now.” He sucked the oily tip of his finger clean. 

“You could,” said Crowley. “But there’s a non-zero chance that we might set fire to the Savoy. Which would be awkward.” 

“Yes, there is that, I suppose.” Aziraphale topped off their champagne glasses. “You’ve never _really_ let me have it, have you?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Temptation. You have such remarkable control over your power. Have you ever really, really tempted me? And I’m not just talking about desserts and the delicious little flourishes you add in bed sometimes. I’m talking about you sinking your metaphysical claws into me and…” He sipped, wetting his lips, the pink tip of his tongue delectable. “…doing your absolute worst.” 

Crowley shook his head and reached for his glass. “Not really,” he said. He’d come close, like the first time, when the mere idea that he’d been about to fuck his beloved right there on a picnic blanket had turned the trickle of his eldritch powers into a small but respectably filthy tidal wave. 

The only other time had been the Incident, and that – despite all his best mental efforts to keep it lowercase – had been strange enough to sprout an uppercase I. Not that the seventeenth century hadn’t been strange enough in the first place, what with everyone getting all kinds of fevered ideas about what demons got up to at weekends. Satanic sabbats, kissing the Devil’s arse, turning into household pets – according to the nascent press of the time, demons were up to all of this and more. Which had all been news to Crowley. He’d been too busy trying to get himself assigned somewhere in Europe, somewhere with nice weather, better wine and no civil wars going on. 

Then the angel had turned up and started banging on about…well…_that_. And things had taken a further turn for the peculiar. 

“I knew it,” said Aziraphale. “I always knew you were holding back, to some extent.” 

“I had my reasons,” said Crowley. “The first time we got metaphysical your bow tie caught fire.” 

“It did not. It only smouldered.” 

“Oh. Well. Smouldered. That’s all right, then.” 

“It wasn’t my fault. I had no idea that would happen.” Aziraphale lowered his voice. “_If_ you remember, _I_ was still a virgin at the time.” 

“I do remember. It didn’t stop you from egging me on, did it?” 

“I couldn’t help it. You try spending six thousand years thinking pure thoughts. Attuning one’s mind to the music of the spheres every time you’re in danger of coming down with a case of…hot pants.” 

Crowley almost inhaled a sinus full of Taittinger 2006. 

“I think it would be interesting,” said Aziraphale, oblivious to Crowley’s distress. “To see what you could do to me if you really wanted to.” 

“Yeah, assuming I _really_ want to. Or at all.” 

Aziraphale fluttered his eyelashes. “Don’t you?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.” Crowley shrugged and squirmed, once again uncomfortably reminded of the Incident. “It’s like…temptation is something I _had_ to do, you know? It’s work. Besides, I don’t have to tempt you. I’ve never had to tempt you. That was what I always enjoyed about your company. One sniff of the wine waiter’s apron and you were all over any lunch I cared to mention. Besides, it would have been weird, tempting you. We were friends. You don’t go rummaging around in your best friend’s sexual psyche without permission, no matter how in love you are. Especially if you’re in love with them. It’s wrong.” 

Aziraphale did his heart-eyes thing, his knee once again rubbing against Crowley’s. “Stop it,” he said. “You know what it does to me when you get all virtuous.” 

Crowley tiptoed his fingers over the back of Aziraphale’s wrist. “Does this mean I’m on a promise tonight?” 

“I should say so. Champagne supper at the Savoy? You can do whatever you like to me.” 

“Interesting,” said Crowley, wondering what it said about him that the first thing that popped into his mind was a scalp massage followed by some perfectly nice sex. He had a feeling that Aziraphale’s picture of what went on in Crowley’s head was a whole lot more Dennis Wheatley, all pentagrams, flashes of stocking, and a lot of seriously weather-inappropriate nudity. He also knew – deep down in the marrow of his bones – that the exact word Aziraphale would use to describe such activity was ‘racy.’ 

“What if I gave you permission?” said Aziraphale. 

“Permission to do what?” 

“_Everything_,” said Aziraphale, his eyes glimmering blue against the backdrop of mirrors and red marble. “An open invitation for you to exercise your powers on me. However and whenever you see fit.” 

Crowley narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had these kinds of fantasies before, and on the whole he wasn’t totally averse to the idea of indulging them. It was just that the reality of being with Aziraphale was far better than the steamy fantasy, on account of things so stupid and soppy that it made Crowley simultaneously cringe and rejoice whenever he thought of them. Little things, like a thumb casually hooked into his belt loop while they stood side by side and browsed the shelves in the supermarket, or a sleepy “Darling,” murmured against the back of his shoulder as they shifted, half asleep, finding the most comfortable way to fit themselves together. 

These days his idea of deviant behaviour involved cuddling. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Is this kinky?” 

“It could be,” said Aziraphale. “I’d be at your mercy.” 

Crowley wrinkled his nose. “Yeah. I’m not sure I’m quite…” 

“Quite what?” 

“I don’t know. That whole power dynamic thing doesn’t really do anything for me.” 

“Well, obviously we’d have safewords and things,” said Aziraphale, once again endangering Crowley’s sinuses. “We don’t have to. I just thought it might be something that would be fun to explore.” 

“I’ll think about it, okay?” said Crowley. As much as he wanted to indulge Aziraphale’s curiosity, a large part of him found the prospect of playing the big bad demon incredibly _embarrassing_. It was tacky, in much the same way that Satanism was tacky, and of course, Aziraphale would get theatrical, because Aziraphale always fucking did. Crowley was up for mostly everything Aziraphale wanted to do, but he had a feeling he might have to draw the line at am-dram flavoured sex roleplay. 

That night Crowley lay alone in bed, listening to Aziraphale – whose standards of dental hygiene were appropriately angelic – puttering about in the bathroom. Not for the first time, Crowley was conscious that he may have oversold the whole sex demon aspect of himself. Yes, he’d had a brief stint as a succubus in the fifteenth century, but it had been brief mainly because he hadn’t actually been very good at it. And obviously he’d had to do the whole satanic orgy thing for work a couple of times, but that had always been very awkward. It was all fun and games until someone made eye contact, and then he’d find himself having to make excuses and find somewhere where he could sit quietly and drink his head off until everyone was safely sexually exhausted. 

Aziraphale emerged, fluffy as a pampered cat in his white dressing gown. “I adore early strawberries,” he said. “But the seeds always get so thoroughly stuck between my teeth. Do you ever find that?” 

Crowley knew he wasn’t really asking because he wanted an answer to the question, but because it was just something Aziraphale often did, a gentle prod at social atmosphere, a way of drawing a person out and into conversation. Like so many other things about the angel, it was a contradiction: he could be as curmudgeonly as a dragon when guarding his book hoard, but on the other hand an encounter in the bakery section of the local Sainsbury’s could tip him over into a full scale conversation with a stranger about the possible effects of gluten on her husband’s eczema. 

“So,” Aziraphale said, as he slipped out of his dressing gown and into bed. “Have you decided what you want to do to me?” 

Crowley closed his book and snuggled in, appetite whetted by that brief flash of angelic nudity. “Not yet,” he said, his hand finding the silk of Aziraphale’s hip beneath the covers. “Let me just…feel my way for a bit.” 

There was a lot to feel. Aziraphale was a substantial armful, warm and solid and endlessly cuddly. Broad thighs, round bottom and a lightly furred belly. His cock was thick and blunt-tipped, and he let out a soft, hungry ‘mmm’ as Crowley’s fingers wrapped around him. He always made the most interesting noises, and his range was impressive. His lowest register was a rumbling baritone like the purr of a lion, and his highest that sexily surprised ‘ooh!’ that was simultaneously – like so many other things about him – deeply embarassing and yet somehow adorable. 

He was purring now, his low moans vibrating gently around Crowley’s tongue as they kissed. “I love you,” Crowley said. 

“I love you, too.” 

“You’re not bored of me, are you?” 

“Bored? How? Have you seen yourself, you gorgeous creature?” Aziraphale frowned. “Oh no. Is this because of what we talked about at dinner? Have I gone and put my foot in it again?”

"No. Yes. Maybe.” Crowley sighed. “All that whole…living down to expectations business. It all gets a bit seventeenth century, you know?” 

Aziraphale nodded. If he caught the reference, he wasn’t letting on, and that was fine, because the last thing Crowley wanted to do was discuss the Incident. “No, that’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on making it a whole formal _scene_, as I believe they call it…” 

“No,” said Crowley, his erection wilting slightly at the word _scene_. Far too close to amateur dramatics for comfort, although now he thought about it, maybe he _should_ indulge any and all of Aziraphale’s fantasies of bedroom roleplay. Give him a safe outlet, as it were, before he tried to get his jollies elsewhere and did something truly horrific, like joining an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan society or an improv troupe. 

“Think of it as an open ended offer,” said Aziraphale. “I just wanted to let you know that if you ever did want to stretch your wings in that direction, I’d be…receptive.” 

Receptive. In a different context it might have been just another word, but right now it spoke directly to Crowley’s cravings. Panting pink lips, soft thighs bracketing his ribcage. He grabbed a handful of curls and pulled Aziraphale in for a kiss, a taste of what he had in mind. Slow and searching, one of those deep, tender dives into flesh that made Aziraphale buck and shudder and swear. 

“I’ve decided,” Crowley said, nudging with his hips. Length to length, the gentle squish of Aziraphale’s belly behind the hot, hard ridge of him. “What I want.” 

“Oh?” 

“Can I fuck you?” 

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, inhaling the soft exclamation as though it were the steam rising from a plate of something utterly delicious. “Oh, yes. Yes, please.”


	2. Chapter 2

The angel’s breath froze in the air. 

It was an icy day in Whitehall, but that hadn’t deterred the crowds. People still enjoyed a good execution, after all. Especially if it was a celebrity. 

“He really is very short, isn’t he?” said Aziraphale, as the slight figure stepped out onto the scaffold outside the Banqueting House. 

“He’s about to get shorter.” 

The king was speaking, but Crowley couldn’t hear. The scaffold itself was ringed with tight rows of soldiers, who kept the crowd at a distance, and the king had never been an imposing public speaker anyway. He’d always talked mostly to himself, and in the interests of convincing himself that he was doing the right thing. And look where that had got him. 

The axe fell. The head thudded. 

A strange noise rippled through the crowd. Over the centuries to come it would be interpreted as a lament or a protest, but to Crowley it sounded like a group version of the low, foreboding _ohhh shit_ that had once escaped his own lips when he realised he’d been hanging out with the wrong crowd. That was the Lord’s annointed, after all, and these were superstitious times. That groan was the sound of someone awaiting a thunderbolt from Heaven. 

But none came. 

“Oh dear,” said Aziraphale, as the axeman held the head aloft. 

“It was inevitable,” said Crowley. “Still, at least they got it off in one go.” 

“Yes. Not like his grandmother. That was a mess.” Aziraphale sighed, releasing another little cloud into the icy air. “They’re not terribly good at this monarchy thing, are they?” 

“What, the Stuarts? No. Hopeless.” 

“Oh well. I suppose it’s just as well they’ve abolished it. The monarchy, that is.” 

“Mm. You know, I had a feeling this century was going to get weird.” 

“Really?” 

“Oh yeah. Right on the stroke of midnight, sixteen hundred. Do you remember?” 

“Yes. We were at that lovely party at Theobalds.” 

They wandered down Whitehall towards the new park. There was a pub on the way and Crowley hoped Aziraphale could be persuaded to hang around for drinks. They hadn’t spent much time together since the riots in Edinburgh. 

“I had that feeling,” he said. “Hairs on the back of my neck. Passing round the booze, Happy New Year and all that, but I had this little voice inside me saying ‘Brace yourself. This century’s going to be a weird one.’ Not fourteenth century bad, but definitely weird.” He shivered, and not just from the cold. “Anyway. Drinks?” 

“Oh, rather. I’m quite desperate to get something warm inside me.” 

Crowley double-taked. He was never certain if the angel actually _heard_ the words that came out of his mouth sometimes, let alone analysed their various meanings. Aziraphale knew words. He would have lived in a library, given half the chance. He could read everything, from the breathy, thorny tangle of Old English to the clay tablet chicken scratches of ancient Babylon, and yet he remained oblivious to sexual double entendre. Less than half a century ago, Crowley had persuaded Shakespeare to add the ‘country matters’ line to _Hamlet_, and it had gone down well, if you’ll pardon the pun. The audience had collapsed, all except for Aziraphale, who sat had there smiling in polite bafflement as the joke sailed clean over the top of his head without ruffling so much as a single angelic curl. 

They went into the tavern, a Tudor building where the inside smelled like fire and spilled beer. It was dark inside, but everything felt dark lately. Long parliaments, long nights, black clothes. Crowley merged into the crowd with ease, but Aziraphale, in his pale buff coat, stood out a little too bright against the dour Puritan backdrop. It wasn’t so much the colour, because plenty of New Model Army men wore buff, but rather the inveterate cheerfulness that he radiated at all times. This was a time of scowling, of pursed lips and Thou Shalt Nots, and Aziraphale wasn’t about Thou Shalt Nots. He tried to be, because it was his job, but his very essence was more one of Well, I _Shouldn’t_ But Oh Well, You’ve Talked Me Into It. 

Cold winter light filtered through the lead latticed glass and caught on the pale ends of Aziraphale’s lashes. His eyes were green. They were that indeterminate light shade that reflected the colours around them, and although it had been almost six thousand years Crowley felt sure they had more shades to show him. He’d seen them blaze blue under thick sweeps of kohl, back when the pyramids were young, seen them cool grey on a smoky night in Florence. And now they were green, against the backdrop of a dark English pub in the wake of a regicide, and he wondered if Aziraphale would catch the other meaning if he just came out and said it. _Your eyes are green today._

Would he read between the lines and realise that Crowley had been watching his eyes change colour since the beginning of everything? And realise what that meant? 

No. Of course he wouldn’t. He’d missed the cunt joke in _Hamlet_, for hell’s sake. 

“Whose side were you on, anyway?” said Crowley, when they were settled with their drinks – mead for him, mulled wine for Aziraphale – and Aziraphale was attempting to get to grips with one of the chewy, indigestible horrors that passed for a pie in the seventeenth century. Crowley may have been a demon, but even he was determined not to even try to eat anything that people unabashedly referred to as a _coffin_. 

“Side? Which side?” 

“In all this business. On one hand you’ve got the Lord’s Anointed, which just ended _very_ badly for him, and on the other hand you’ve got the New Model Army marching under the banner of the Lord.” 

“Oh, these are human conceptions of God,” said Aziraphale. “We don’t really concern ourselves with them.” 

“Holding yourself aloof as usual then?” 

“I’m not aloof.” 

“You are aloof,” said Crowley. “You’re the biggest loof I’ve ever met.” 

Aziraphale laughed far too loudly, drawing stares. “Stop it,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m not like you, Crowley. I’m an angel. I’m _supposed_ to be a little aloof. I’m supposed to remain above the fleshy realm.” 

“He says, wrestling a mutton pie down his neck.” 

“Would you like some?” 

“Absolutely not,” said Crowley, and shuddered. “To think, I could be in Italy right now. Decent wine. Edible food.” 

“Then why aren’t you?” 

Crowley, who had been attempting to amuse himself with one of those new-fangled newspaper things, picked up the paper and pointed to the nearest woodcut. “This,” he said. “It can’t have escaped your attention that there’s been a whole lot more demonic activity since this whole war business broke out.” 

Aziraphale leaned forward to frown at the picture. It depicted various demonic familiars, allegedly belonging to a witch somewhere in Cambridgeshire. Some of them were fairly straightforward, including the obvious black cats, but others were baffling even to Crowley. There was a greyhound with the head of a cow, and a fat spaniel with no legs. Each familiar was labelled with its infernal name. 

“And what’s that?” Aziraphale said, pointing at the spaniel, whose name was apparently Jarmara. 

“That is a legless witch dog,” said Crowley. 

“A what now?”

“It’s a familiar. Appears in the form of a spaniel with no legs. Satan only knows how it gets around. Probably floats. Then you’ve got these guys – Eliezer, Pyewacket, Holt, Grizzel Greedigut – and then this one with the cow head is named Vinegar Tom, because of course he fucking is.” 

Aziraphale frowned. “And these are all your people?” 

“No. That’s just it. They’re not. You can put this down to a lot of things. Strange times, overactive imaginations—” 

“—ergot poisoning—” 

“—also a contender. Or it’s just a case of Puritans being peculiar. I mean, did you hear about the thing with the poodle?” 

Aziraphale blinked. “Poodle?” 

“Prince Rupert, right? The ex-king’s nephew.” 

“Right.” 

“Had a dog. A poodle named Boye.” 

“Oh yes,” said Aziraphale. “Marston Moor, wasn’t it? Most unfortunate.” 

“Yeah, well, get this,” said Crowley. “According to some in Cromwell’s camp, Boye was actually a girl. And not just any girl. Do you know what that dog was supposed to do at night?” 

“I’m slightly afraid to ask.” 

“It turned into a necromancer,” said Crowley. “A sexy lady necromancer. And then…they all had sex with it.”

Aziraphale scrunched his nose. “Right,” he said. “We’ll just chalk this one up to the ergot poisoning, shall we?” 

“No, it’s not,” said Crowley, waving the newspaper. “It’s _this_. And if it isn’t this, it’s certainly not bloody helping. Humans love a wild rumour, but this newspaper business is delivering it right to their doors. And apparently what they want is demons, witches, satanic orgies, kissing the devil’s arse, dancing naked…” 

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. He just couldn’t help himself. “Have you ever…?” 

“I can’t see how that’s any of your business.” 

“No. Of course not. Terribly sorry.” 

“This is what I’m dealing with lately,” said Crowley. “Used to be that if someone got a case of the witchburnings it was confined to some dank village in the Black Forest and stayed there. But this? Since the unholy trinity of half-baked demonology, the printing press and rising rates of literacy, downstairs have developed _expectations_. They see results, they want me to work twice as hard. Never mind that half of this shit is the product of fevered Puritan minds. I had a minor demon ask me – with a straight face – if I knew how to turn into a poodle. They’ll be asking me if I know how to turn into a floating legless witch dog next. I could be in Venice drinking grappa right now, but no. The bloody humans have upped the ante and so tomorrow I have to head off to Cardiff to plague some cattle and curdle all the milk in a dairy.” 

“Oof. Cardiff,” said Aziraphale. “That’s a bit of a trek.” 

“Yeah. Tell me about it. You know me and horses.” 

“I think I might be able to help you out on that one,” said Aziraphale. 

“Oh?” 

“I’ve got to be in Port Talbot. Fish related miracle. I could pop down to Cardiff and curdle your milk.” 

Crowley blinked over the top of his glasses. No idea. He really had no idea how smutty he sounded sometimes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You did the last one. Don’t you want to toss a coin?” 

“What’s the point?” said Aziraphale. “I’m going to be in the area. I may as well do yours. You can owe me a favour. It’s not a problem.” 

“Oh. All right. Thanks. That’s very nice of you.” 

“I’m an angel,” said Aziraphale. “I’m always nice.” 

As it turned out, Crowley didn’t have to go all the way to Wales to fall foul of horses. On Tuesday he had been minding his own demonic business when a chandler’s horse suddenly did the white-eyed twitchy thing that horses tended to do around Crowley, and planted two filthy hoofprints squarely in the middle of his trouser area. 

“I could fix the cracked pelvis,” he said. “But the bruising’s taking a while to go down.” He bared the lower part of his stomach, the purple slowly beginning to fade from the deep wine colour it had been in the beginning. 

Aziraphale sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Oh dear. Does that go…?” 

“Oh yeah. All the way down.” Crowley performed an uncomfortable adjustment. “The only good thing about this situation is that at least it’s not one of those times of year when it’s difficult to lay hands on an icepack.” 

“I’m so sorry. I feel awful.” 

“Why? It’s not your fault.” 

“I know,” said Aziraphale. “But part of me still thinks if you’d been in Cardiff…” 

Crowley waved him off and poured out more wine before hobbling back to his chair beside the fire. “If I’d been in Cardiff I’d have probably have been kicked by a different horse. A Welsh one. Actually the nationality of the horse is irrelevant, since they all fucking hate me. Why do you think I like Venice so much? Gondoliers don’t flare their nostrils and kick you in the knackers just because you smell wrong.” 

Crowley glanced down at the fire. He could smell sulphur, which was never a good sign, and sure enough an unholy scroll appeared and rolled lose from the side of a log. He picked it up with the fire tongs, waited for it to cool down for a moment and unfolded it. Great. Lust. Exactly the kind of temptation he wanted to be performing when his scrotum had only just returned to its usual size. As to when it would return to its usual colour, well – that was anyone’s guess. 

“What is it?” said Aziraphale. 

“Work. New assignment.” 

“Can’t you tell them you’re not well?” 

“No. I don’t get sick days. You know that. Evil never sleeps, and it definitely doesn’t get time off to sit around icing its nethers after being attacked by a demented horse.” 

“Let me see,” said Aziraphale, getting to his feet. 

“No.” 

“Crowley, let me…” Aziraphale snatched the paper. “I’ve done temptations before. Let me just…” He started to read. It took a couple of seconds for him to get to the relevant part. “Oh. _Oh_.” 

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “Not really your area.” 

Aziraphale flushed. “Oh come on,” he said. “How hard can it be?” 

“Do you even hear yourself sometimes? Seriously?” 

Aziraphale handed back the scroll and returned to his seat beside the fire. “I’ve tempted people to every other one of the Seven Deadly Sins,” he said. 

“Yes, but you’re better at some than others,” said Crowley. “Let’s be honest. I mean, Gluttony, Pride and Sloth – you did bang up jobs of those. Couldn’t have done it better myself. But your Envy’s barely green, your overall level of Wrath doesn’t get much above Slightly Miffed and your Avarice – frankly – is next to non-existent.” 

“I’m sorry,” said Aziraphale. “But money doesn’t really mean that much to me.” 

“Exactly. And this…well…this doesn’t mean that much to you either.” Crowley hesitated, and heard himself ask, “Does it?” 

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “I see,” he said. “So you have never seen me as a sexual being. Is that what you’re saying?” 

“Uhh…brrf…” 

“I may never have danced naked at a Satanic sabbat, Crowley,” said Aziraphale. “But I’ve read some things that would make even your hair curl.” 

“Are you supposed to do that?” said Crowley. “You’re an angel.” 

“I’m not supposed to drink wine or eat pies, but I do.” 

Crowley felt his perceptions of reality roll and creak in a way they hadn’t done since a certain Viking party with some very interesting mushrooms. “Are you trying to tell me that you’ve…?” 

“No. Of course not. _That’s_ not allowed. But I’m just saying I’m not completely ignorant of these matters.” 

“Good for you,” said Crowley. “But that in no way qualifies you to take on a sexual temptation. These things can get pretty damned filthy, you know.” He glanced at the message from head office. Of course the temptee had to be a Puritan, didn’t he? “We’re dealing with people who think Cavaliers copulate with poodles. The guy’s name is Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, for fuck’s sake. There is no way he’s not already sexually weird.” 

“Wait, that was his _name?_ I thought that was part of the instructions on the memo?” 

Crowley hobbled to his feet and handed back the scroll. “Nope. There in black and white. Someone thought that was an acceptable thing to name a human. I feel sorry for the poor prick already, and it’s my job to turn him into an ironic, self-fulfilling prophecy.” 

Aziraphale blinked. A new and disturbing curiosity was taking shape behind his eyes. “Can you…” he said, with a stuttering glance in the vague direction of Crowley’s lap. “I mean, are you in…in any shape to _do_ that right now?” 

“Not really,” said Crowley. “Thanks to that horse.” 

“Well, there you go then. Maybe I could help.” 

“You already owe me a favour.” 

“I know, but I’m nice.” 

Was he? Or was he just curious? Crowley had a flashback to a drunken night in Florence, when he’d said far too much at once (_I had a bit of a fling. Actually I had more than one, and they were both complete fucking disasters because…)_ but that had been as far as he got, because Aziraphale had done that befuddled blinky thing, reached for his wine and said, “Just so we’re clear, we are talking about…_sex_ here, aren’t we?” And he’d been speaking Italian at the time, but had still managed to mouth the word _sex_ in a frightfully English undertone that had inspired Crowley to shut up and sober up in a hell of a hurry. 

You didn’t mess around sexually with angels. You just didn’t. Even if the angel in question was a bit rubbish and had distractingly pretty eyelashes. Even if right now the cold winter sun was lighting up the pale ends of those lashes and casting a halo over his curls. “Fine,” said Aziraphale, sensing – and completely misinterpreting – Crowley’s intense scrutiny. “If you must know, my motives aren’t entirely pure.” 

Crowley’s stomach did a thing that lacked an adequate physical comparison in 1649.* Was this it? Perhaps Aziraphale hadn’t misinterpreted him at all. Perhaps it was about…_to happen_? 

“Look,” said Aziraphale. “It stands to reason that if we’re going to keep doing thse things, then we have to do as good – or as bad – a job as possible. Do you see?” 

Crowley coaxed moisture back to his dry mouth. No. Not happening. Why did he still keep doing this to himself? “Yeah,” he said, reaching for his drink. “Yep. Totally.” 

“If they look at the records and see that you were supposed to be tempting someone into sexual incontinence, but in reality only actually pulled off a spot of successful marriage counselling, it’s going to look suspicious, isn’t it? Or if I was supposed to bless a newly consecrated church and made the place reek of sulphur and filled the font with frogspawn.” 

“Toadspawn,” said Crowley. “It was toadspawn, actually.” 

“Do you see my point? It has to look convincing, and I need to learn, too. So…teach me.” 

“Teach you?” 

“Yes. Teach me how to inspire…lust.” 

Like he needed lessons. “What? Now?” said Crowley. “Because my ice-pack’s melting and it’s not very sexy.” 

“No, not now,” said Aziraphale. “If you won’t let me do the temptation, why don’t I come to Lancashire with you and…observe? It could be on-the-job training.” 

“Uh…” said Crowley. Aziraphale always had the worst timing. Absolutely the worst. Of all the times and places he could he could have raised this subject. They could have spent a hot spring night in Florence, drinking Chianti and tenderly exploring one another beneath a single linen sheet. They could have got into some steamy fondlings in a bathhouse in Pompeii, or sneaked off in the middle of Cecil’s New Year’s bash and saw the new century in with kisses and confessions. There had been countless opportunities for romance over the centuries, but of course the angel picked this moment – when the order of the day was black clothes, scowling and no fucking fun _ever_ – to bat his gossamer lashes and ask Crowley to teach him how to inspire lust. 

Aziraphale took Crowley’s stunned silence for hesitation. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Crowley,” he said. “For once in your life, just learn to take yes for answer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Or at least one that wouldn’t be fully understood by humans until after 1998, which was the year when the Oblivion rollercoaster first opened at Alton Towers.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a note on the kitchen island, the paper tucked under the edge of a Cabernet that Aziraphale had opened to breathe and then apparently forgotten about. 

_Just wanted to remind you that the open invitation still stands._

_A._

_P.S. The safeword is Aardvark._

_ Aardvark?_ Crowley mouthed, and shook his head. They needed to have a frank and open discussion about this at some point, because this was just fucking baffling. Aziraphale _said_ he wasn’t bored, but apparently he was still in the mood to want to spice things up with a spot of metaphysical kink. 

“I mean, how would you even categorise this?” said Crowley, vaguely addressing himself to his windowbox full of anxious herbs. “Eldritch service topping? I swear, it’s 1649 all over again. ‘Show me how you do it, Crowley. I want to learn. Be in both of our best interests if I did.’ Like it was that bloody easy. Like I didn’t have to do something unspeakable to get all of _that_ out of my system.” Crowley shuddered. It had been almost four hundred years, but to his lasting shame there were still muscles inside him that twitched appreciatively at the memory. “He knows what I can do. I showed him. And now what? Has he forgotten?” He sighed and reached for the wine glasses. “What am I talking about? Of course he’s forgotten. Or pretending to have forgotten.” 

Another angelic contradiction. Aziraphale had an excellent memory, except when he didn’t. All too frequently his focus on one particular aspect of a memory was so sharp that it blurred out all the other aspects, so that he could tell you the ingredients of the chicken dish they’d been eating on a May evening in Florence in 1498, but not the details of the messy-drunk, rambling conversation Crowley had tried to have with him, concerning Crowley’s recent attempts – and failures – to have something approximating a love life. 

Not that Aziraphale had understood, of course. 

Crowley went to look for Aziraphale and to ask him if he remembered opening a bottle of wine. The bathroom door was ajar and a delicate stream of Mozart bubbled through the crack.

Aziraphale lay in the tub, soaking in music and suds. From where Crowley was standing he had a perfect view of the angel’s profile, of his tip-tilted nose and the slight overbite that lent such a strange, sweet candour to his smile. His eyes were closed, his lips curved in contentment. Little bubbles floated upwards, as though they were unable to restrain themselves in the presence of a creature of light and air. 

The love songs hadn’t covered this, either, but they should have done. As Crowley was about to turn and walk back into the kitchen, he caught himself in a moment of awareness of what he was about to do. To turn around, go into the kitchen, pour Aziraphale a glass of the wine he’d forgotten and bring it to him in the bath. 

And for a split second there he’d almost taken it for granted that he _could_ do this, a thing that only a handful of years ago had been the stuff of his wildest, loneliest fantasies. He could walk in there, right now, push his fingers into Aziraphale’s damp curls and smother him with so many kisses and love confessions that Aziraphale would blink up at him in pleased surprise and ask what on earth had brought _this_ on? 

Aziraphale exhaled a happy sigh and sank deeper into the tub. Crowley was about to walk in when he saw the gleam of teeth, white against a flushed lower lip. A tiny frown, a slow breath drawn in through the nose. Crowley knew all these things intimately, and he knew exactly what they meant. 

He’d never seen this before. He’d always assumed it _had_ happened, because these things did, but this was perhaps the only thing that Aziraphale was shy about. If Crowley asked him to touch himself he’d do so, but he’d always laugh and get a bit bashful about it. Perhaps it was because self-loving came too close to the sin of Pride, but whatever. This was interesting. 

Not to mention exciting. 

Aziraphale turned his head slightly, towards the door. Crowley instinctively stepped back out of sight, but the angel’s eyes were closed. Crowley could just make out the subtle motion of his shoulder. The wet tip of his tongue. 

Open invitation, after all. Crowley could have walked in and asked if he minded an audience. He could have offered a hand, but for some reason he felt compelled to just watch. Crowley had performed this way for Aziraphale enough times, and turnabout was fair play, after all. 

Another sigh, a soft, ragged sound, unsteady, like the sighs that slipped past Aziraphale’s lips whenever Crowley had him in hand, stroking slowly, thumb rubbing back and forth over the little velvet scrap of foreskin. The way he was stroking himself right now, hand busy beneath the bubbles. 

Open invitation, thought Crowley, and exhaled through pursed lips, releasing a thin, dark stream of lust into the warm, scented air. It drifted through the gap in the door and curled like smoke, mingling with the steam of Aziraphale’s bath and carrying with it the steady, psychic whisper of Crowley’s desire. 

_ …want you need you love you come to me come to me and fuck me…_

He’d asked for it, after all. 

Aziraphale gasped. The music was between movements and Crowley could hear the crackle of the stylus on vinyl, and the steady slosh of the bathwater as his temptation found its mark. 

_ …your hands on my thighs your breath between my legs want your mouth wet around me and your fingers pushing in…_

The music started up again – _allegro_, a bubbling, burbling clarinet – but Aziraphale was no longer listening, no more than Crowley was. His whole being was fixated on the speeding breaths, the gentle splashings, the faint, half-stifled cries of an aroused angel. Aziraphale sucked in a sharp breath and Crowley saw the curl of darkness vanish between his lips, and felt the answering throb behind the fly of his jeans. 

_…want you want you want you open me wide fill me up with your hunger your lust give me it all split me open and call me your slut…_

“…oh_fuck_.” There was a splash. Aziraphale had evidently knocked over the shampoo bottle with his toes. “Oh God.” 

Crowley smothered a laugh behind his hand. He watched for a moment as Aziraphale’s breaths slowed and he sank back down into the suds, then slipped away into the kitchen, a hand still over his mouth. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling, as though the orgasm he’d just enjoyed had been his own. Crowley readjusted his jeans and poured out the wine. As much as he wanted to take care of his own pleasure, it could wait. Right now he wanted to see how Aziraphale would react when he walked in. 

He went into the bathroom, a glass in each hand. “You forgot the wine,” he said. 

Aziraphale gave him a wide-eyed look, like he hadn’t even realised Crowley was upstairs. “Oh,” he said, flustered and – this was really intriguing – somewhat _guilty_. “Oh, thank you.” 

It had been a while since Crowley had seen that look, and the first time he hadn’t even been sure what it had meant. He still wasn’t entirely sure now, some three hundred and seventy odd years later. Nor was he entirely sure whether Aziraphale had felt him tempting from behind the bathroom door, and on balance he suspected not. The guilty blush was way too realistic for an actor of Aziraphale’s ability. 

Crowley handed over the wine and vented his feelings by leaning in and devouring Aziraphale’s mouth, swirling his tongue so deep into the kiss that Aziraphale made a low, surprised sound in the back of his throat. “Nice bath?” asked Crowley. 

“Lovely.” 

“You look flushed.” 

“The water’s hot.” 

Crowley trailed his hand in the water. “Yes. It is.” He ran his wet fingers over Aziraphale’s bare shoulder and leaned in again to nibble at an earlobe. He had a feeling he had just witnessed something secret and maybe a little bit shameful, and it was doing terrible things to his demonic libido. “I got your note, by the way.” 

“And?” said Aziraphale, his vague air of flusterment blowing away like pinkish fog, giving way to the shameless creature who talked casually about doing things that required safewords. Yet another contradiction. 

Crowley settled on the chair near the foot of the tub. “Aardvark?” he said. “Why aardvark, exactly?” 

Aziraphale shrugged. “I just dipped into the nearest dictionary.” 

“You didn’t dip very far.” 

“Why? Is aardvark not acceptable to you?” 

“It’s fine,” said Crowley. “It’s very clear. I mean, that should be the whole point of a safeword, right? It should be something that you would never say in a different context.” 

“Not never,” said Aziraphale. “I should think it’s impossible to never, _ever_ use a word.” He sipped his Cabernet. “But the last time you said ‘aardvark’ was almost two thousand years ago, so I thought it was probably fine.” 

“When did I say that?” 

“I told you, two thousand years ago. Rome. I asked you if you were still a demon and you said what else would you be? An aardvark? Remember? And then we drank until you got significantly less surly, and then we went for oysters.” 

Crowley frowned. “Your memory scares me sometimes. So focused and yet…so selective.” 

“Selective?” 

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t.” 

Maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t. It was hard to tell with Aziraphale. On one hand he was a master of appearing absolutely oblivious, and on the other hand he couldn’t so much pretend to pull a coin from behind Crowley’s ear without being forced to admit his duplicity. All Crowley knew for certain right now was that Aziraphale had just wanked in the bathtub and appeared to be remaining secretive on the subject, even though he _had_ to know how obvious it was. 

Or did he? Was that just another thing that sailed over his head like a Shakespearean twat joke? Obviously he didn’t see himself the way Crowley saw him, but surely Aziraphale had seen himself reflected in Crowley’s eyes enough times to know how delicious he looked when he’d just come? The first time Crowley had held a post-coital angel in his arms he had momentarily forgotten how to say anything besides ‘I love you,’ because Aziraphale had _glowed_. 

Just like he was glowing now, golden and pink cheeked, with his lips already stained with the velvety wine in his glass. His eyes were blue now, a deep, wide pupiled bedroom blue that spoke of appetites sated. Crowley put down his drink and reached into the water, overcome by the desire to touch him. “All right, you,” he said. “Come on. Give me those angel feet.” 

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said Aziraphale, but he slid down in the water anyway, unable to quite conceal his pleasure. 

“I want to.” 

When he’d first slithered up to the angel, Crowley’s very first glimpse of Aziraphale had been of his feet, bare soles against hot stone. Great, he’d thought. Someone to talk to, someone who might _maybe_ agree with him that God had been unreasonably brusque about the whole Tree of Knowledge palaver. Of course, he’d known he was unlikely to get that kind of concession from an angel, but then it had turned out that this angel was different. Special. A bit rubbish, and so much the better for it. 

And he had lovely feet. 

Crowley’s own feet were big, scaly and not always as human looking as they should have been. Aziraphale’s were perfect, pink and white, with delicate blue veins, tidy toenails and high arches. They were also – as Crowley came to discover – ticklish, so when handling them it was best to use a firm touch. He pressed his thumbs into the sole, just above the heel, and pushed with strong upward pressure towards the toes, eliciting a delighted moan. 

“It’s not good for me, you know,” said Aziraphale. 

“What’s that?” 

“This. You bringing me wine and giving me foot rubs in the bath. If Gabriel could see me now. I’ve gone beyond soft. I’m spoiled rotten.” 

“You do the same for me,” said Crowley. “You rub my head, I rub your feet. And sometimes we meet in the middle and rub the really interesting parts together.” 

“It can’t be healthy,” said Aziraphale, in a not-very-convincing attempt at virtue, given that he currently looked like an allegorical portrait of happy hedonism. “Living lives of uninterrupted pleasure.” 

“Shut up. We lived our lives at the beck and call of Heaven and Hell for six thousand years. _And_ we saved the world. If anyone’s earned the right to lives of uninterrupted pleasure, it’s us.” 

“You know, you’re absolutely right, dear. We do.” Aziraphale sighed, sipped and wiggled his toes. “When I think of all the nonsense I used to have to put up with. All those blessings and Inspirations. Hanging around Papal conclaves.” 

“Yeah, and they could go on for a while.” 

“You don’t have to remind me,” said the angel, stifling a yawn. “Four months holed up in the Capella Paolina watching various Carafas, Sforzas and D’Estes figure out who to bribe next. Oh, and then the Farnese got involved, naturally. Honestly. It was like a who’s who of the most competitive families in Italy. And not an untarnished soul among them.” 

“Who won?” said Crowley. 

“Oh, a Medici, I think.” Aziraphale frowned for a moment in thought. “Yes, definitely. They were on one of their upward swings at the time. Had stopped assassinating each other and were settling into the new dukedom. Drawing up blueprints for the Uffizi, as I seem to remember.” 

“You loved Florence.” 

“So did you.” 

Crowley switched feet, wondering if he’d ever told Aziraphale about that particular fantasy, the one where he’d poured out everything in his heart and this time Aziraphale had understood him. Then they’d gone upstairs hand in hand, stripped each other naked and made slow, breathless love in the smoky Tuscan night. 

Not like the reality, where Crowley had babbled drunkenly about Leonardo da Vinci for about five minutes, before Aziraphale was finally all ‘wait, are you talking about _sex_?’ and shattered Crowley’s pathetic fantasy so completely that Crowley vomited for the first time since the fourteenth century. 

“I always liked Venice better than Florence,” said Crowley. “Fewer horses, for one.” 

“You poor darling. You always did come a cropper with horses, didn’t you?” 

“Oh yeah. Sixteen forty nine.” 

“What about it?” 

“I got kicked in the happy bits by a horse,” said Crowley. “Do you remember? Freezing winter in London.” 

Aziraphale bit his wine-stained lip. “Oh, that rings a bell. Something happened that year. That winter. I want to say it was something to do with a rump…” 

“No, it was more of a head situation,” said Crowley, drawing a finger across his throat. “Charles the First.” 

“That was it,” said Aziraphale. “Bit of an oops.” 

“Bit of an oops? A man was decapitated in front of you and that’s your angelic verdict? Oops? And you’re supposed to be the nice one?” 

“There are limits to my niceness. Let’s be honest – he’d been carrying on like a man who had been trying to get his head separated from his body for a very long time. Could have quite easily gone into an exile and lived it up with the absolutist inlaws in France, but oh no. Kept banging that drum about the divine right of kings and started _another_ war.” Aziraphale drained his glass and looked around for more booze. Crowley obliged him. “Shame, really. He had such a wonderful art collection, too.” 

“Did he?” 

“Oh yes. Marvellous taste. A real eye for colour and composition. Would have made a magnificent art curator. Absolutely no head for governance though.” 

“Well, he definitely didn’t have one when Parliament had finished with him,” said Crowley. He was conscious that he was skirting a little close to the circumstances that had led up to the Incident, but watching Aziraphale in the bath had tugged at the frayed hem of an old curiosity. Crowley didn’t do well with curiosity. He tended to tug on the hem and then watch in strangely impressed dismay as the entire metaphorical sweater unravelled into a pile of frizzy yarn. 

“We went for drinks afterwards,” Crowley said. “Do you remember? You were trying to eat a mutton pie.” 

“Oh, I remember. All too vividly. The food was one of the worst aspects of the seventeenth century.” 

“Yeah, that and the plague,” said Crowley. “Oh, and the poodles. Poodles that turned into sexy—” 

“—lady necromancers,” finished Aziraphale, once again startling Crowley with the strength and selectiveness of his recall. “And floating dogs with no legs.” 

Crowley laughed. “_The World Turned Upside Down_,” he said, recalling the old song. “Strange times, angel. Strange times.” 

“Busy times for _you_, what with all those amateur demonologists running around causing mischief.” 

“Oh, non-stop. My feet barely touched the ground in those days.” He emptied his glass and wondered if he was drunk enough to ask. _Do you remember? You? Me? Lancashire? A lesson in temptation?_

What exactly _had_ occurred inside the angel’s corporation on that singularly awkward day? Crowley couldn’t help thinking – in the light of Aziraphale’s post-masturbatory evasiveness – that he now knew the answer. Or maybe his confidence was just the result of day drinking half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was hard to say right now. 

“I should get out of this bath,” said Aziraphale, inspecting his shrivelled fingertips. “Before I turn into a prune. Did you have any plans for dinner, darling?”


	4. Chapter 4

It was Valentine’s Day, not that you’d know it in this cold, damp corner of Lancashire.

The only person radiating love around here was Aziraphale, and that was only because it was his job. At the start of the journey north he had been humming happily, which had become irritating almost immediately, and now the tune in his head had burrowed into Crowley’s. 

_ …holy days are despised, new fashions are devised,_

_ Old Christmas is kicked out of town._

_ Yet let’s be content and the times lament, you see the world turned upside down._

The roads were boggy and several times the horses had almost disappeared into potholes. Their route took them past Oxford, where some down on his luck Cavalier tried to do the highwayman thing that was so popular lately, only to meet with a pair of scowling yellow eyes and a single word. _Don’t._

He hadn’t.

By the time Crowley and Aziraphale arrived in Lancashire they were both travel stained, cold and thoroughly grumpy. Crowley had been so happy to find a stationary, comfortable, highwayman free place to sleep that he’d barely even registered that there was only one bed. He fell on it and gratefully passed out.

They had never shared a bed before. Or at least they had, nominally. They’d had the same room, like now, but Aziraphale always got all pursy-lipped about the notion of sleep and sat in a chair, either reading or sitting motionless, blinking into the darkness with probably more eyes than were strictly necessary. Crowley had always wanted to ask about the eye thing, but had somehow never got around to it. It seemed like it might be a personal question.

That night Crowley dreamed of Florence, and things that had never happened, of grey angel eyes and warm skin and Aziraphale’s lips on the inside of his wrist. Aziraphale placing kisses in the palm of his hand, spreading out his fingers and sucking the tips of each into his mouth with the same methodical relish as the way he worked his way through a plate of grapes. Whispering in his fussy, still faintly Latin-accented Italian, (…le tue mani sono molto belle. Mi piacciono le tue dita lunghe, ed i tuoi occhi gialli…) solid thighs pressed either side of one of Crowley’s as they rocked together, (…mio amato, ti amo anche più di Dio…) hard but slow. Slow. Slow because they’d had each other fast and greedy the first time, and now it was time to savour, to drown slowly and deliciously in love words and long gazes and half-shameful laughter about how _stupid_ they’d been not to do this sooner.

So it was something of a shock to wake up and find Aziraphale next to him on the bed. He was sitting up, reading the latest newspaper. “Oh, there you are,” he said, as though Crowley really had been all the way to Italy and back. Crowley hoped he hadn’t said anything inappropriate in his sleep.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing much. The usual. Demons. Witchcraft. Satan has appeared in the form of an enraged cow on the outskirts of Preston, apparently.”

“Nice for him,” said Crowley, sitting up and rubbing the kink out of his neck. The room was cleaner than most, but incredibly cold, the damp, bone-aching cold of an English winter, made doubly offensive by the fact that Crowley had just emerged from dreams of a Florentine spring and the warm body of a love-flushed, florid angel. Aziraphale licked his upper lip and Crowley pined hopelessly in his general direction. He had made a terrible mistake, coming here. There was no way he was going to survive this little field trip, not without making a total fucking fool of himself.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me, are you?” said Aziraphale.

Crowley’s stomach did the cold plunge thing again. “Tell you what?”

“Whether Satan is in the habit of appearing in the form of a cow?”

“Oh. No. Of course not. That’s inside information.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” said Aziraphale. “Still, worth a try.”

“And I’m supposed to be the wily one.” Crowley glanced at the paper. It was, as Aziraphale said, the usual. “Did you see that? _Local Crone Predicts Apocalypse._ Sounds like it might be right up your alley. Are you still collecting books of prophesy?”

“Trying to. It’s hard to keep pace with them at the moment. Everyone’s a prophet when they’re cutting off heads and upending the natural order. At this rate I’m going to have to find somewhere to _put_ all these books.”

Crowley leaned in again, his shoulder nudging Aziraphale’s. “‘In the eighty sixth year of thatte century shalt ring forth the sledgehammer of Gabriel, and all shalt wonder as the chickens danceth, though they wot nott the true meaning of the songe.’ What do you suppose _that_ means?” 

“I suspect it means that Mistress Nutter has been drinking again,” said Aziraphale. “Gabriel’s never held a sledgehammer in his life. I doubt he’d even know how to use one. He’d probably just sneer and dismiss it as human tool. You know what he’s like. Anyway, is there anything to eat around here?”

Later they went out in search of the victim. At first Crowley thought it was going to be difficult, given that the memo had only given him a very basic description of the witchfinder – black clothes, sour face, stupid hat – which could have been just about anyone at this time and place in history. As it turned out, Pulsifer had a knack for drawing attention to himself. He was holding forth outside a fourteenth century church, and had drawn quite a crowd.

“Here in this quiet corner of England is where they foment their malevolence,” he was saying, as Crowley and Aziraphale joined the crowd, Aziraphale once again looking far too cheerful to blend in with the scowling Puritan throng. “Be not deceived, good people.” Pulsifer glanced over at them. “Be not won by a smiling countenance…”

Aziraphale composed his features into a suitably seventeenth century expression.

“…or a well-turned calf. Nay, _especially_ not an uplifted bosom or a cherry lip…”

“Hel-lo,” murmured Crowley.

“…be not deceived, for although a comely maid may appear to be a creature of Heaven, so often she is the vessel of Hell. It is her very pulchritude that lures the Devil to her white, raspberry tipped breasts…”

Aziraphale exhaled a small cloud. “Ooh. Bit racy.”

“…he finds shelter beneath her skirts. Between her supple thighs. And there. There, good people, you shall find the _places_ for _suckling_…”

“I can’t listen to any more of this,” said Crowley, turning on his heel. “It’s going to degenerate into full blown, shapeshifting poodle erotica any minute. Let’s find some booze.”

“Why on earth are you tempting this man to Lust?” said Aziraphale, as they headed back across the village green, icy grass scrunching beneath their boots. “The inside of his head appears to be seamy enough already.”

“Public relations thing,” said Crowley. “Anyone who talks that much shit about Satan gets knocked down a peg. Expose his hypocrisy, I suppose.”

“Isn’t that rather petty?”

“Yes. But people find it funny. And by people I mean demons.”

Aziraphale walked faster, quickening his pace to match Crowley’s longer strides. “You mean to tell me Hell does things just because they’re _funny_?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of reason is that?”

“Perfectly good reason,” said Crowley, throwing open the door of the tavern and ushering the angel inside. “Have you ever been to Hell? It’s awful. You need all the laughs you can get. Are you telling me that Heaven never does anything just because it’s funny?”

“Absolutely not. There is always a divine purpose. God doesn’t just do things…on a lark.”

“Bollocks,” said Crowley, snagging a seat by the fire.

“What do you mean?”

Crowley thought for a moment. “Ostriches,” he said. “Have you ever really looked at an ostrich?”

“What do ostriches have to do with anything?”

“Think of an ostrich,” said Crowley. “Really think about it. Or a flamingo. The legs. The _knees_. The way its whole head looks like it’s on upside down. You can’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humour. A good one, too. Shame we fell out, really. We might have got on.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Wipe that smile off your face, Crowley. _You’ve_ been nagging me not to look so cheerful ever since we got here.”

“With good reason. What’s got into you?”

Aziraphale pressed his lips together. He was trying, but for some reason he’d been quietly bubbling with suppressed mirth for a while now. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just…it’s the Elect, you know?”

“No.” 

“The Elect. Puritans. Our man out there…” He nodded towards the window. “He’s very, very sure he’s getting into Heaven.”

“Uhhh no,” said Crowley. “He’s not. He’s spent his entire life sticking pins in old ladies who’ve done nothing worse than own cats and have opinions. He’s toast, angel. He’s ours.” 

Aziraphale’s nose wrinkled as he struggled to restrain his laughter. “_I_ know that. And _you_ know that, but he’s so sure, you see. Because of Predestination.” He stifled a very unangelic snort. “The doctrine that God has singled him and others like him out for grace before any of them ever existed. Before _anything _ever existed.” 

Crowley frowned. It all sounded slightly ineffable to him. “Ri-ight,” he said. “And is that a thing that God ever did?” 

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Have you…mentioned any of this to the Elect?” 

Aziraphale succumbed to a guilty, helpless laugh. “Of course not.” 

“That’s not very nice of you.” 

“Oh, they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. Does it make me a monster if I find Calvinism absolutely _hilarious_?” 

Crowley shrugged. “Meh. Knock yourself out. Feels like _someone_ should have some fun with Calvinism. Let’s face it, the Calvinists aren’t.” He waved to the waitress to bring them a couple of bottles of claret. It couldn’t hurt to get started on the good stuff. “Come on. We’re going to need some privacy for this next bit.” 

They went back upstairs. The waitress raised an eyebrow and Aziraphale didn’t help matters by looking apprehensive as he mounted the stairs. “Why do we need privacy?” he asked. 

“Adjustments,” said Crowley, closing the door. “You need to make some adjustments.” 

“Excuse me? What adjustments?” 

He was glad he’d brought the wine up. He was going to need it. “Did you miss the part about supple thighs and raspberry tipped breasts? If you’re going to tempt the man it might be helpful to…you know…” 

“What?” said Aziraphale. “Have nipples?” 

“Don’t be dense,” said Crowley. “It doesn’t suit you. You know what I mean. When was the last time you…you know.” Nope. He didn’t know. And if he did he wasn’t letting on. They’d come all this way and he’d been so eager to learn and all, but at the end of the day it was going to be as pointless as trying to teach a cat to speak Russian. Did he even have a cock? Presumably he did, or maybe they weren’t allowed. “When was the last time you _changed_, Aziraphale?” 

“Oh. I see. Oh. Well…um…pfft. Been a while.” 

“Well?” said Crowley. “Don’t look at me like that. There’s a winsome, buxom blonde inside you, just begging to get out. Give the lady an airing once in a while. It’s only polite.” Oh, for Satan’s sake – this was hopeless. “What? Don’t look at me like I’m trying to make you eat a slug. Do you have a problem with being female?” 

“I told you,” said Aziraphale. “It’s been a while.” 

“How long?” 

“I don’t know. I…I lost count.” 

Crowley groaned. “How many centuries are we talking?” 

Aziraphale made a strangled, evasive noise in the back of his throat. 

“_Millennia_?” 

“Look, I’m not as comfortable with the notion as you are,” said Aziraphale, blushing furiously. “To be honest, I’m not sure I even remember how to do it.” 

“You _what?_” Crowley adjusted. “It’s not that difficult,” she said, wincing slightly. “Although maybe don’t do it when your boy parts are still bruised, because _that_ was a bit tender. Just squeeze your pelvic floor, rummage around in your essence and just…switch.” 

“You make it sound so easy. You make it _look_ easy. I mean, are you…you know?” 

Crowley unbuttoned her coat. 

Aziraphale turned properly crimson. “Oh, good lord.”

“Go on,” said Crowley. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you as a woman. I bet your tits are spectacular.” 

“And what if I can’t switch back?” 

“What are you on about?” 

“I can’t…” Aziraphale folded his arms across his chest and gazed pointedly at the ceiling. “Look, I know this is going to sound very stupid to you, and I know you’re going to make fun of me.” 

“No, I wouldn’t. What’s going on?” 

“If you must know, I don’t like to do it because I have this overwhelming anxiety that I’ll get…stuck.” 

“Stuck?” said Crowley. 

“Yes. That I won’t remember how to switch back. And I’ll be stuck. As a woman.” 

“So? What’s wrong with being a woman?” 

“The unwanted sexual attention?” said Aziraphale. “The constant threat of violence? The fact that you’re not allowed to vote or hold religious office? Nobody takes anything you say seriously, you can’t go out for a quiet drink on your own without some…some dreadful person coming up to you and telling you to smile so that you’ll look pretty. And everyone expects you to be so bloody nice all the time.” 

“You are nice. You’re an angel.” 

“Yes, and yet somehow still not nice enough to meet the impossible standards of agreeability that the world seem to expect from women. As if I’d want to smile and look pretty for such an…ape, honestly. And that’s before I’ve even started talking about the constant scapegoating, because whatever evil is going on in the world there’s always some _woman_ behind it, whether it’s naked witches’ sabbats or humanity’s Fall from Eden, which, by the way—” 

“—yeah, yeah. Blame the woman, why don’t you?” 

“Don’t be disingenuous, Crowley. You weren’t even a woman at the time. You were a snake. And it _was_ your fault.” 

“I was just asking questions,” said Crowley. “Whatever. Don’t change if you feel that strongly about it. I’m just saying, it’ll make it a lot easier to tempt him if you’re his type. Although you never know. Might be a case of the witchfinder doth protest too much, and all that drooling thigh and nipple talk back there was to hide the fact that what he really wants in a lover is thick thighs, a nice smile and juicy fat cock.” 

“Please don’t say things like that. Not when you’ve got your…your bosoms bouncing all over the place like that.” 

Crowley – who had had just about enough – tweaked her nipples through the linen of her shirt. “I know. They have an interesting relationship with gravity, don’t they? It’s like it doesn’t apply to them.” She shook out her long red hair and wondered why she hadn’t thought of this sooner: the bruising felt so much better without all those bits dangling around, getting caught on things. “You’re so out of your depth. It’s ridiculous.” 

“I am not out of my depth,” said Aziraphale. “I can handle this. I’m just…I’m not entirely clear on what to do. I turn into a woman and…then what?” 

“You give the man what he wants.” 

“What? Women tied to stakes and set on fire?” 

Crowley sighed. “Feed his imagination, angel. Satanic sabbats. Shapeshifting poodles. All the lurid shit that goes on in the dirty woodcuts. You know the form.” 

“Crowley, I cannot cavort naked at a Satanic sabbat. I am an _angel_.” 

“Who said anything about cavorting? Nobody’s doing any cavorting around here.” 

“Good,” said Aziraphale. “I’m very glad to hear it.” 

“So am I. It’s fucking February in Lancashire. I already got kicked in the crotch by a horse. I don’t need frostbitten tatas on top of everything else.” 

There was a loud, rude knock on the door. More of a pounding, really. “Open up in the name of Parliament!” 

Wonderful. They hadn’t been here five minutes and Aziraphale was already causing havoc among the Puritans by smiling too much and wandering around humming Cavalier ballads. Aziraphale, who was standing nearest the door and apparently still determined to be as unhelpful as possible, opened the door. “Hello,” he said. “Can I help you?” 

Crowley heard the speaker before she saw him. “Sir, I have reason to believe you are fomenting treason, or _things_ directly antithetical to the laws of God and Nature.” 

“Oh no,” said Aziraphale. “That’s not really my area. I think perhaps you’ve got the wrong room?” 

“I have not, sir. I have it on good authority that you took yourself abed with _another gentleman_ in the middle of the afternoon…” 

Crowley slunk over to the door. She wound herself very deliberately into the shape of Aziraphale’s side and stared into the witchfinder’s eyes. Blue eyes. Blue eyes, an oblong sort of face and – beneath the beard – a surprisingly plump red mouth that could have been described as sensual, if it weren’t for the way it turned down slightly at the corners. As it was, the first word that popped into Crowley’s head was _petulant_. Sulky little shit, always pouting because he wouldn’t allow himself the things he really wanted to do. As they stared at each other, Crowley realised with a start that she wasn’t wearing her glasses, but Pulsifer’s eyes had already moved in the inevitable downwards direction and had fixed on her erect nipples beneath the linen. That was one of the advantages of this shape: men almost never paid attention to her eyes. 

“And what gentleman would that be?” asked Aziraphale, winding an arm around Crowley’s waist and almost startling her out of her bucket-topped boots. 

“Uh…” Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer blustered for a moment, but Crowley could already see his narrow-yet-hungry mind seeking out the next irregularity in the picture before him. 

“As you can see,” said Aziraphale. “There’s nobody here but myself and my wife.” 

Crowley wriggled closer, beginning to enjoy herself for the first time since she’d left London. “We’re on our honeymoon,” she said, and nuzzled the edge of Aziraphale’s ear. His hand tightened on her waist. “Come up from London.” 

Pulsifer’s pink mouth twitched. “Your wife is striding about the place in gentleman’s attire, sir,” he said. 

“Oh, I know,” said Aziraphale. “She does as she pleases, don’t you, my dear?” 

“I do,” said Crowley, and nuzzled some more. “Mostly. Except when I do as _you_ please, my angel.” 

A dull light danced in the centre of the witchfinder’s pupils. Crowley could readily picture what was going on in his head, because it wasn’t totally dissimilar to what was going on in her own – Crowley riding a wide-eyed angel in the middle of the lumpy bed. Pulsifer’s lust smelled damp and swampy, and Crowley rolled the scent over her sensitive tongue, trying to better ascertain the texture and depth of it. Not nearly as warm as it should have been, because this milk-blooded animal never allowed the fire inside to flicker, never mind rage, but flicker it did. Little pale tongues of heat, like flashes of marsh gas. Instinctively, she swayed close to the warm body beside her. Aziraphale’s hand felt as hot as an ember through the linen, and she rubbed her cheek against his curls, watching Pulsifer light up with another one of the big seven. Envy. 

Crowley took his lust, twisted it into a fine black thread and exhaled it back to him. _You want to unwrap me, don’t you? Like the bride you think I am. Peel off my shirt. Suck on my red nipples, like the greedy baby you are._

Aziraphale shivered. Did he feel it, too? Oh, this had the potential to go _very_ wrong, but Crowley’s usual control was slipping. Temptation was like grain alcohol, or tears: once you got started it was hard to stop. “You should leave,” she said. “We have some marital business to attend to.” 

Pulsifer’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. Crowley breathed deeply once more, only this time a different scent bloomed on her tongue. Bright. Gold. And _hungry_. 

“You can’t watch,” said Crowley. “Now go away.” She reached out and slammed the door, breaking the contact with Aziraphale. 

Shit. Aziraphale was looking distinctly owlish, but there was nothing owlish about the scent tickling the back of Crowley’s psychic palate. It was huge, golden, powerful as a lion, and it was this that snapped Crowley back to sanity, the thought that there might be a four-fold lion face somewhere beneath all the angel’s eternal beige. Crowley’s flesh was in full revolt, warm and already clutching gently at some imagined length of angel, but this…this was a fucking disaster. All those years of sly, playful flirting, quiet pining and elaborate masturbation fantasies, all with one object – of maybe, just a little bit, turning him on. 

Only now Aziraphale was _on_, and Crowley panicked. 

“You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” said Aziraphale, and his eyes were like the smoke of a burning city. “Tempting to Lust?” 

With a huge psychic effort, Crowley dammed the dark stream of desire. “Please stop fucking looking at me like that,” she said. 

“I can’t help it. I can feel it. I’ve never felt like this before.” 

“Please don’t,” said Crowley. _I’ve never felt like this before._ She couldn’t begin to count the number of times she’d wanked to the thought of him speaking those exact words. “Get a grip. This is business, not pleasure.” 

Aziraphale swallowed hard and gave himself a little shake, as if settling his ruffled feathers. “No, of course,” he said, briskly. “You’re absolutely right.” 

“To be honest, I didn’t think your bread was buttered this side,” said Crowley, gesturing to her recent adjustments. 

“It’s not. It’s not buttered any side. Angels aren’t allowed…butter.” Aziraphale fucking loved butter. He spread it thickly on his bread, slathered it on hot pikelets, and licked the drops of melted golden fat from his immaculate fingertips. 

“Are you sure?” said Crowley. “Because I would never have even come here if I thought there was any danger of you being tempted to anything that might raise your cholesterol.” 

“There isn’t. I’m fine. It’s like you said – business, not pleasure.” 

“You could _Fall_, angel.” 

“I’m not going to Fall,” said Aziraphale. “I came here to learn, Crowley. In the interests of keeping this whole arrangement of ours under better wraps. For both of our sakes.” 

“But you don’t really understand my powers,” said Crowley. “You got a tiny backdraft of it and you went all…unnecessary.” 

Aziraphale scowled and pursed his lips, reassuringly back to his usual fussy self. “I did nothing of the sort,” he said. “And feel free to stop treating me like a child. I may be younger than you, but I’ve still been on this earth for over five and a half thousand years and I am extremely well read. Whatsmore, I am a Principality of Heaven. I am the Angel of the Eastern Gate, and I can handle any temptation you care to throw at me.” 

Crowley scrunched her nose. “Yeah. Except if there’s cake involved.” 

“Don’t make me say something unchivalrous.” Aziraphale sighed. “Look, let’s just get on with what we came here to do, shall we? I didn’t come to this damp, Puritan infested corner of Lancashire for fun, you know. Now. Explain to me what you just did to that witchfinder.” 

“Fine,” said Crowley, taking a seat in the window and drawing up her legs. “Here’s how it works. I’m not sure how it will work for you, because you can’t smell lust. Can you?” 

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Are you sure? Because you seemed to get quite a whiff of it a minute ago.” 

“I can sense love?” said Aziraphale. “Maybe that’s what it was. Perhaps he had tender feelings towards you?” 

“No,” said Crowley. “He just wanted to suck on my tits, tear off my breeches and pound me like a dirt cheap steak. Trust me on this. I know tenderness, and that wasn’t it.” 

“When have you experienced tend—” 

“—do you want to fucking learn or not?”

“_Yes_.” 

“Good. So pay attention. Let’s forget the smell thing for now. You don’t have to smell it. You can see it. When a human’s lusting you can see it, right? In their demeanour. In their eyes. In the shapes their mouths make in repose.” 

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “Those plump, wet lips of his. So venal. Put me in mind of Chaucer’s Pardoner.”

“There you go,” said Crowley. “You’re getting it. Use your eyes. However many you have…if that’s not a personal question.” 

Aziraphale huffed. “It rather is, actually.” 

“Right. Sorry. So, if you can’t use your eyes, use your nose, okay? Just…stare into him. See what he wants. Take it into yourself and then add whatever you see fit. Weave it into a thread with your own hunger and then just…breathe it back into him.” 

The angel just blinked like a cat. A cat that wasn’t about to start learning Russian any time soon. Great. 

“You’re not following me, are you?” said Crowley. 

“I’m…I confess, I’m not.” 

Crowley swung her boots down from the window seat and sighed. “Have you ever had a sexual fantasy before?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“Right. That’s a no, then. I can see we’re going to have to go back to basics.” 

Aziraphale stood up. “I’m ready. Do your worst, demon.” 

“Okay, I’m _definitely_ not going to do that,” said Crowley, whose worst was already rampaging through her head. Torn linen, ruffled wings, angelic buttocks bouncing up and down between her greedily splayed thighs. She paced instead, circling Aziraphale as she gathered her thoughts. Where to begin? “Picture yourself naked between cool sheets,” she said. “Another warm body wrapped around you. Their thigh between yours. Their hand over your heart.” Oh, this was dangerous, but it was as close as she was ever going to get to telling him, and she’d kept in inside for so long now. “You’re breathing in the smell of their hair, their skin, the sweat from your sex. You’ve already fucked once, good and hard. Hands and knees, open mouths…” 

He was breathing faster already. A terrible mistake, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “You knew you shouldn’t, but you did it anyway, because you were on fire. Your lust and your loneliness kept you up at night, and you knew you’d never have peace until you were balls deep. Hearing them cry out your name when they came.” She leaned closer, her lips almost brushing his ear. That roaring golden scent shone bright on her tongue once more and the bruised flesh inside her shivered and pulsed. Aziraphale’s eyes were closed, his mouth a little open. Should stop. Couldn’t stop. “And so you fucked, like hungry animals. And it was delicious. Exquisite. Everything you wanted it to be, but you still want more, don’t you?” 

“Yes.” His eyes remained closed, and maybe that was for the best. 

“And now you have time,” said Crowley. “And liberty. To touch. To taste. To suck, and fuck, and lick, and fondle…” She struggled to rein herself in. Her control was usually so much better than this, but he was somehow as deep in her head as she was in his. “Are you all right? Is this too much?” 

Aziraphale swallowed. “I can handle it,” he said, without opening his eyes. “Keep going. I can picture it now. What comes next?” 

“Look into _him_,” she said. “See what he wants. Imagine it. Make yourself part of his thirst, his lust. It’s a twisted, idiot thing, because he’s fucked it all up, you see. His nature. Kept running from it. He thinks he’s going to Heaven because of some stale Swiss doctrine, and so he must act accordingly, the poor, stupid prick. He’s filled his empty head with goblins and demons, because he doesn’t have the honesty to admit to himself _why_ he wants to go looking under womens’ skirts. You saw the way he looked at me, angel. He wanted to suck on my nipples. Push my thighs apart and stare between them, but he wouldn’t have found any witch marks. Not even on me, an actual demon. Although he _might_ have found something to suckle…” 

The angel gave a soft gasp. The tip of his tongue darted out to wet his lips and Crowley couldn’t help but imagine that tongue between her legs, that prissy, cupid’s bow mouth fastening over her clit. Sucking gently. “Can you see it?” she said. “Can you feel it? Can you picture his lust?” 

“Oh yes,” said Aziraphale, in a breathy voice that almost took her trembling knees out from under her. 

Crowley circled behind him, because she knew if she had to look at him a moment longer she wouldn’t be able to resist it. And then it would happen. Moans and flying feathers, followed by a possible long, cold plunge into perdition for him. How the fuck had this got so out of hand? “Now,” she said, pushing her fingers into his silver-blond curls. “Imagine him standing before you, like he was at the door. Imagine breathing in and tasting the appetite that’s rolling off him like stink. Suck it in to yourself, angel. Picture it as a wisp of smoke, or a fine black thread. Do you see it?” 

He nodded, the motion of his head tugging at her fingers. 

“Good. Now reach inside yourself for your own hunger. The thread of lust that I taught you to spin. Now…twine the two. Twist them and twist them until the fibres blend and it becomes silken and strong and _thick_.” She gave his hair a gentle pull. “Then exhale.” 

Aziraphale released a long, shaky breath. 

“Breathe it back into him. Stronger than before. Harder to resist. Do you see?” 

He made a soft, helpless sound of assent. Temptation resisted. The gold scent shone brighter, as if in defiance of the tarnish Crowley had attempted to apply. She smiled, so proud of his strength that she couldn’t help leaning and placing a tender, close-mouthed kiss against the delicate skin beneath his ear. “And here endeth the lesson,” she whispered, releasing his hair. 

Aziraphale gulped. “Right,” he said, after a short, breathless pause. “Well…that seems…straightforward.” 

“It’s pretty easy when you get used to it,” said Crowley, who was – perversely enough – also proud of herself for _not_ ending up bent over the bed with her breeches round her knees. She knew that didn’t say anything particularly good about her talents as a sex demon, but hey, at least it proved the angel was as good as his boasts. And that was good, for some reason. Meant things could carry on as before, and that she hadn’t just accidentally ruined the closest thing that either of them had ever had to a lasting friendship, even if Aziraphale kept insisting that they weren’t friends whenever anyone asked. 

“Right,” Aziraphale said, again. “Well…thank you.” 

“Thank you?” said Crowley, and then it suddenly hit her what had just happened. Mr. Oh-No-We’re-Not-Friends had slid his arm around her waist and introduced her to a human as his _wife_. “Oh, fuck me,” she said, the words falling out of her mouth before she could stop herself. 

Aziraphale opened and closed his mouth a couple of times and turned red. “Uh…I thought this was business, not pleasure?” he said. 

“It’s an _expression_, angel.” How could someone this clever be this dense? 

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Oh. Well. Good. Of course it is.” He tugged at his collar. “Room’s awfully stuffy, isn’t it? I think I’m just going to…get some air.” 

The door slammed behind him. Crowley stared at it. “Right,” she said. “Well. That was a thing.”


	5. Chapter 5

Aziraphale kept his eyes closed.

His mouth was open and educated tongue at work, but his eyes remained closed, and it was this – among other things – that was driving Crowley mad. It felt as though they had been kissing for hours now, even though part of Crowley knew that they had never begun, because this was just a dream, untethered from the laws of time. Aziraphale’s hand was all the way under her shift but stopped just short of where she really wanted it, the tips of his fingers teasing the hair. “Please,” said Crowley, almost biting his mouth in her desperation. “Please. Are you going to make me beg? Look at me, angel.”

But his eyes remained closed, even as he opened her up. As his fingers dipped in Crowley heard her own flesh make a soft, wet petal noise, like something unfurling in the warmth of the sun after rain. “You’re soaked,” he said, and his thumb found the tip of her, the bud of flesh plump and slick beneath his touch. His fingers pushed inside, and she stretched, satisfied only for a moment. She wanted more – fingers, tongue, cock – but it was just a background ache compared to the need for him to just _look_ at her. She kissed the lids of his closed eyes, feeling the fringes of lashes beneath her lips. “Look at me. Look at me. Make this real.”

She felt the shape of his smile against her kiss, but he didn’t open his eyes. His soft, spotless fingers found the place inside her, the one that – when rubbed just so, like that, oh _yes_ – showed her the first inkling of the texture of her coming climax. Slow and clutching, not hard and sharp this time, because this had been building and building, fuelled by lewd, intrusive thoughts of how it would feel to take an angel’s cock. An angel’s virginity. The demon within her writhed, frenzied by the blasphemy of it. “Wider, dear,” Aziraphale said, even though her legs were already spread wide enough to make her hips ache, and the thin skin of her perineum felt as taut as a drumskin. Stuffed full of angel fingers, and he still wouldn’t open his fucking eyes, so typically withholding that a part of her wondered if this really _was_ a dream. “You’ll swallow me past my wrist, you serpent,” he said. “Oh, your cunt loves me.”

Definitely a dream, then. That word would never pass his holy lips, but at least here he was hers. “So much,” she whispered. “So much. Please.” She was close, so close. He would have to look at her when she came, surely? “Look at me. _Please_ look at me.”

His lashes trembled. “I have eyes everywhere,” he said, his thumb rubbing steadily. “On the end of my tongue. The tips of my fingers.” His eyes opened – grey-green-blue and full of love and hunger – and she cried out, starting to come. “I see you, Crowley. I see everything.” The contractions of her muscles were strong enough to drag her up through layers of sleep and remind her that in reality she was empty, clutching and pulsing around nothing. And she was coming. In her sleep. In the same room as Aziraphale.

Oh shit.

Crowley surfaced, hips still grinding gently into the aftershocks. Her shift was bunched into a hard knot between her thighs and mortification settled like a wet blanket as she realised that there was no way she hadn’t been _humping_.

Aziraphale wasn’t on the bed. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, reading a book. Or pretending to read a book. His expressive arched brows were held at an angle that suggested a new and terrifying open-mindedness towards this particular pleasure of the flesh. Oh, shit, shit, _shit_. Had there been moaning to go with the humping? There’d probably been moaning. Loud, open-mouthed, unambiguous moaning.

She peeled her parched tongue from the roof of her mouth and tried to remember how to talk. “What time is it?”

“Early for you,” said Aziraphale, in a deliberately light tone that did nothing to disabuse her of the notion that he’d just witnessed something incredibly embarrassing. “Late for witchfinders. One gets the impression that they get up very early in the morning. Just in case someone is taking advantage of the hour to do something they shouldn’t.”

Yeah. Something like having noisy wet dreams about being fingerbanged into the middle of next year by an emotionally withholding angel. That definitely fell into the category of things that demons shouldn’t do. He caught her eye and gave a brief, nervous smile, plunging her into a fresh layer of horror when she realised she might have said his _name_.

“Right. Well…” She sat up in bed, pulling the covers up. “We’ll…get a move on, then.”

Aziraphale got up from the chair and stood there awkwardly for a long, excruciating moment. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’ll go and get some air. Give you your privacy.”

Crowley stared up at him, the covers once again sliding down over her chest. He looked back, the shifting sea shades of his eyes making her twitch and quiver once more at the thought of his fingers between her legs. She still ached, but the bruising only seemed to make her more conscious of the empty space inside her. Could he see? Could he stare into her and see that every particle of her was standing up and howling for him?

He reached down to her. She sat transfixed, a charmed serpent. His fingers brushed her hair and tucked a strand of it behind her ear, then he seemed to catch himself at it and snapped back his hand too quickly. His smile was shy and soft. “Your hair looks nice like that,” he said, and left the room.

She exhaled with a nasal ‘huh’ sound. The next breath seemed just as unlikely to behave itself, and she found herself scrambling for the nearest pillow. She buried her face deep into it and screamed, a long, desperate wail of hunger and frustration. How? Why? What the _fuck_ had she done to herself this time? She’d only gone and taught him to poke around in someone’s deepest sexual feelings, and yet it suddenly occurred to her that he hadn’t done that. They’d been eye to eye, and he could have done it. He knew how to do it now, but he hadn’t. He’d almost definitely seen her come, possibly while moaning his name, and he was still too deep down _decent_ to put the fresh evil she had taught him to good use.

Crowley picked up the pillow and screamed again. “Stop it. Stop making me in love with you. It’s awful. I hate it.”

After several more much needed screams, she steadied herself and started to dress, this time as a woman. “Look, it’s fine,” she told herself, holding one lace of her stays clenched between her teeth while she negotiated the rest. “You haven’t been fucked in over a century. It’s only natural that you might have gone a little bit peculiar.” She reached behind her and pulled in the laces. “You’re going to get out of here, go to Venice, get very drunk, find some lovely human who calls you _Antonio_ in a sexy accent, then fuck until you can no longer feel the soles of your feet. Get it out of your system. And the next time he turns up you’ll be like ‘Oh, hi, angel. Been a while. When was the last time? Sixteen forty-nine, was it? I can’t remember. You know me. Busy, busy. Doing evil. What, me? Orgasm in my sleep while moaning your name? No, that doesn’t sound like me at all. Next you’ll be saying I scream into pillows because I can’t stand how much I…’” Crowley sighed. “Oh, this is the _worst_.”

She found Aziraphale – still too pale and too bright for this dark decade – serenely feeding bread to ducks on the village green. Pulsifer was bustling around outside the church, trying to look busy and purposeful but actually pausing every few moments to gaze at a trio of quietly giggling young girls. Given the date, they were probably talking about valentines, but the steady seethe of Pulsifer’s poodle-infested mind could be felt from across the green.

“Look at him,” said Aziraphale, smiling fondly at a mallard. “The absolute concupiscence of that creature. He’s a slave to it.”

“And won’t admit it,” said Crowley, assuming that Aziraphale wasn’t talking about the duck. “I know. It’s very sad.”

Aziraphale glanced over at the witchfinder and stifled a laugh. “They’re all running around in the woods, you know,” he said. “Those girls. He’s imagining them performing pagan rituals in the nearby woods.”

“Oh, I know. Not a stitch of clothing between them.”

“Oh yes. Stark naked and shameless. Painting each other’s bare breasts with demonic sigils.”

“In goat’s blood.”

“Mm. Possibly indulging in experimental lesbianism,” said Aziraphale.

“What do you mean, possibly?” said Crowley. “They’re _definitely_ experimenting with lesbianism. Only experimenting, mind. I know how their mind’s work – men like that. They want the whole floor show of girl-on-girl action but none of the actual…fisting. That tends to make them feel inadequate.”

“Fis…?” Aziraphale didn’t get past the first syllable. Hah. Evidently hadn’t read about that, had he?

“You’d be amazed what you can get up to with a vagina,” said Crowley, as the witchfinder approached. “You’re missing out.”

“Good morning,” Aziraphale sang out, smiling sweetly in the face of Pulsifer’s scowl. “You were looking very busy over there by the church. Is something happening?”

“Witchcraft,” said Pulsifer. “That’s what’s happening, sir.”

“Really?”

“Very much so,” said the witchfinder. “This area of Lancashire is a hotbed. A veritable pit of demons, blasphemy and conjurations.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Well, that sounds shocking, doesn’t it, dear?”

“Scandalous,” said Crowley. “You should write a strongly worded letter to one of those newspaper thingies.”

Pulsifer’s watery blue eyes lit up. “I may very well do that,” he said. “They don’t even try to hide it, you know.”

“And who are they, exactly?” Aziraphale asked.

“Witches, sir. Witches. There is a crone not five miles from here who strides about wearing the name like a badge of pride. Agnes Nutter, Witch. That is how she introduces herself, and somehow remains unburnt.”

“Oh, come now, Mr Pulsifer,” said Aziraphale. “We are English. We don’t burn women just because we suspect they are witches.”

“No,” said Crowley. “We hang them instead. Much more civilised.”

Aziraphale huffed softly. “Burning is a punishment reserved for heretics. Not witches.”

“Which I’m sure was a great comfort to all those English women who were executed as witches,” said Crowley. “As they slowly choked to death at the end of a short rope, I’m sure they were all thinking ‘Well, at least I’m not on fire.’”

“Your bride is something of a handful, sir,” said Pulsifer, glancing at Crowley, who gave him a sarcastic smile. He would have liked to have set fire to her, she thought, and under normal circumstances she would have liked to set fire to him, too, but they’d left normal circumstances behind sometime during the Long Parliament, and Crowley hadn’t had sex since the late fifteenth century. At least, that was the excuse she reached for, when seized with an impulse too revolting to put into words.

“I will be speaking in the church, shortly,” Pulsifer was saying. “I trust you will attend? You and your good lady?”

“Uh…possibly. I’m not sure. I mean, we hadn’t made any firm plans for the day, had we, darling?”

“Nope,” said Crowley, who was making firm plans to find a large cock and sit on it until she was successfully exorcised of all these bothersome desires. For a second there she had actually contemplated _Pulsifer_ in a sexual context, and she was sure it was only a short step before she went full seventeenth century and started having bizarre erotic fantasies about shapeshifting poodle necromancers.

“Someone has to stand up the evil that is infecting the minds of our women,” said the witchfinder. “Corrupting their decency, their purity…” He cast a wistful glance at the young girls as they walked past. “Their firm, blushing innocence.”

“Absolutely,” said Aziraphale. “Good for you. Just out of interest, exactly how much demonic activity do you see on a regular basis? An approximate figure. Say…weekly?”

Pulsifer puffed out his chest. “Oh, there are no approximate figures, sir. There are only nice and accurate figures. We in the Witchfinder Army keep _records_.”*

“_Do_ you now? How interesting. And how do you assemble these records? Do you have agents on the ground, as it were?”

“We need no agents on the ground. Not with the innovation of newspapers. We read. We scour. We cut out and keep every item of interest and investigate those which most make the hairs upon the napes of our necks stand up.”

“What a wonderfully efficient way of going about things,” said Aziraphale, and for the first time Crowley noticed the musical note of interest in his voice. Efficient, yes, if you didn’t mind running up and down a dozen blind alleys, chasing Satan in the form of annoyed bovines. “I’d love to see your records, if that’s at all possible.”

“Of course,” said Pulsifer, and excused himself. A small crowd had begun to assemble near the church.

Crowley eyed the angel with suspicion. “What are you up to?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that,” said Crowley. “You want to see his records? Why? What are you expecting to find?”

Aziraphale adopted his most guileless expression. Unfortunately, it never landed, because from the very first, from that first sputtered admission to a total stranger – “I…I gave it away.” – he had always been painfully honest.

“Oh, fine,” said Crowley, annoyed. This was all Aziraphale’s fault. All of it. There were thousands of other angels, and lots of them weren’t even that pleasant, which made Crowley even more suspicious that Aziraphale was doing this deliberately. He was just drifting around Creation being all winsome and delightful on purpose. He was thwarting with intent. “If you want to waste your time reading about possessed cows and floating legless witch dogs, knock yourself out. Have fun with that.”

“It might help me get into his head.”

“What do you mean, get into his head?” said Crowley, turning towards the church. “He’s a walking erection in a big, black, stupid hat. You don’t have to get into his head. You can stroll straight into it, pull up a chair and watch the horny, satanic peepshow unfold. Come on. He’s about to fling open the doors of his diseased psyche and invite us all inside. It’ll be great practice for you.”

Aziraphale frowned as they entered the church. “Aren’t you uncomfortable?”

“Very,” said Crowley, tugging at her collar. “I’m buttoned up to the bloody nose here.”

“Yes, but we’re in a _church_.”

Crowley selected a chair in the back. Just a chair. Not a pew. No elaborate carvings, no holy symbols. “It’s a bit tingly,” she said. “But it’s mostly unconsecrated.”

“What do you mean, unconsecrated? It’s a church.”

“Yeah, but they’ve stripped it all down, haven’t they?” said Crowley, waving a hand at the plain walls, the shadows of medieval saints shining through the whitewash here and there, like glimpses of colourful ghosts. “Taken out all the hardcore sacramental stuff – the chalices, the altar cloths, the monstrances. All that heavily blessed stuff. How do you think I managed to fill a font with toadspawn? If it’d been high church I wouldn’t have gone near the thing. Terribly dangerous, but the lower the church, the more likely it is to be just plain water, you see. It’s nothing more than symbolism to them. They don’t even consecrate the bread and wine at communion. The altar is just a table. That’s Puritanism, baby.”

Aziraphale’s eyes widened as it dawned on him. “Wait, are you telling me that the very idiots who spend all their lives ranting about demons are actually making your life _easier_?”

“Yep,” said Crowley, and smirked. “You’re right. Calvinism _is_ hilarious, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale blew out an irritable breath. “Sanctimonious ba…barbarians. Do they really think they can get closer to God by destroying all that lovely religious art?”

“I know. That’s the pity of it. I like a bit of religious art myself. Oh, did I tell you Bernini’s working on a thing at the moment?”

“No.”

“Oh, should be right up your alley. Angels with flaming swords and all that. Or is it a spear? I can’t remember. Either way, there’s impalement. I think the finished piece should provide a particular…frisson.”

“Impalement?” said Aziraphale, raising an eyebrow. “Why on earth do you think I’d be interested in _impalement_?”

Crowley decided to shut up. Impalement. Angels up her alley. Flaming swords. She was giving Aziraphale a run for his money in the double entendre department.

“Is this your new friend?” said Aziraphale, after a moment, as they watched the church fill with dark clothes and dour expressions.

“Hmm?”

“Bernini? Is he your new artist friend?” Aziraphale inspected a cuticle with an abnormal degree of interest. “Like Leonardo?”

“Oh,” said Crowley. “No. No. I mean, he’s good. He’s great, actually. But there was only one Leonardo.”

“Yes. So I’ve heard.”

Crowley was just about to ask Aziraphale why the mention of Leonardo always made him turn waspish, but Pulsifer looked as though he was about to start talking. He stepped behind the unadorned lectern, his eyes sweeping over the congregation, as though he were performing that time-honoured public speaking trick of imagining his audience naked. Only in his case he was probably not only stripping them all naked but mentally counting their nipples. Pulsifer _wanted_ to see demons, Crowley realised. His desire to be right and to be vindicated was so powerful that in a normal person Crowley would have categorised it as one of those helpful overriding desires that really had the power to fuck up the state of a person’s soul, but Pulsifer wasn’t normal. No matter how huge his other desires, they were all as candles to the Savonarola sized bonfire of his Lust.

A perfect subject for a trainee temptation, really. She couldn’t have picked a better subject for Aziraphale to practice on.

“All right,” she said, in a whisper. “Listen closely. Feel your way. Remember what I told you about the sexual fantasies? Do you have one ready to go?”

Aziraphale flushed. “I think that’s rather a personal question, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I don’t need you to draw me a picture. I’m just asking if you…if you have a round in the chamber. Ready to go.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Then put your faith in God and keep your powder dry.”

Pulsifer was looking their way. Just for fun, Crowley poked out a forked tongue at him. _Hi. Demon. Blink and you’ll miss me. Oops, you blinked. Nothing to see here._

He started off slow. At first Crowley thought that things must have been even duller than they seemed in this part of Lancashire. If this pale, horny little man could pack a church then maybe there wasn’t nearly as much witchcraft going on as Pulsifer insisted. And maybe there should have been, because these people seemed badly in need of excitement, even in an era where most people in these damp isles were desperately tired of living in interesting times and would relish the prospect of some simple, old-fashioned English boredom.

Aziraphale sat with his hands folded in his lap, head cocked attentively like that of a gundog. It was like a reflex with him, Crowley thought. Didn’t matter if the church had been so stripped of the trappings of sanctity that a demon could sit there without smouldering – show him a lectern, quote him a psalm and Aziraphale would sit there with his hands folded and listen. Like the angelic version of Crowley’s instinct to stick her tongue out at the preacher.

“We are the Elect,” Pulsifer was saying. “We are the builders of a new Jerusalem. We have abolished the idolatrous king and his Popish queen. We have purged this Commonwealth of religious gewgaws and crude Roman trumperies.” He was getting into a rhythm now, and for the first time Crowley caught a glimpse of his angry, lust-fired charisma and realised it was only a matter of time before Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer broke an even bigger commandment than his namesake. If he hadn’t already. “We have stripped down our faith down to its bare bones and we are closer to the light of God for it.” He paused for effect. “But there is a sickness, my friends and neighbours. A malaise sent by Satan himself.

“The adversary has seen our success, good people. And he hates it. The very prevalence of his minions amongst us proves that we are doing something righteous.” Pulsifer leaned over the lectern, his eyes glimmering like marsh fires. “Demons scream the loudest when they are being exorcised. They shriek in the night like a shameless bride on her wedding night…”

“…oh, here we go,” muttered Crowley. A muted ripple ran through the crowd. _This_ was why they packed the church. And why not? There were probably precious few dirty books around here, and not everybody could read. She nudged Aziraphale. “You’re on. Huff it up, angel.” 

“Prick them and they cry out for shame and sin. They will slither between the thighs of your wives, gentlemen. Be vigilant in your bedrooms, lest you be cuckolded by the Devil himself.”

Oh yeah, this was the stuff. To Crowley’s metaphysical eye the witchfinder now looked like an open container of liquid nitrogen, only the brimming smoke was black instead of the usual white. It poured across the floor, filling the spaces between the dark woollen skirts and bucket topped boots of the congregation. Aziraphale watched it approach. He pursed his lips in reflexive disapproval for a moment, then drew in a slow, steady breath.

“…the Devil craves a fair maid, good people. Craves her like a snake craves milk. She is his perfect instrument, her beauty an enticement…”

Aziraphale’s eyes widened. So did his mouth, stretched by the thickening column of black smoke. “Close your mouth,” said Crowley, starting to panic. Shit. Of course he’d have no self-control when it came to putting things in his mouth, would he? He never had before. Why would he start now? “Angel, stop. You’re taking too much _in_.”

“…but if the Devil is within her you may find him there and draw him out. You will know him by the shudders within her flesh…”

“…_Aziraphale!_”

With some apparent difficulty, Aziraphale closed his mouth. “I’m fine,” he said, tugging at his wide lace collar. “There’s no need to panic. Stop hissing at me, Crowley. I’m doing the twisty thing you told me about, all right?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Shut up. People are _looking_.”

“…you will know him by the sounds she makes when you touch her secret places…”

But it wasn’t all right. The smoke was still pouring up Aziraphale’s nostrils in two sneaky streams. It was pouring up everyone’s noses at that point. It smelled bitter as burned sugar or opium, a potent mixture of dark, dirty hungers and a level of sexual frustration that was surprising even to Crowley, who knew so much about frustration that she could have written an entire Library of Alexandria’s worth of books on the subject. The crowd fidgeted, hanging on Pulsifer’s next line.

“…if possessed she will be seized by fits when you enter her…”

“…_help_…” Aziraphale’s voice was a small squeak in the back of his throat. Clearly he had now decided it was time to panic, and Crowley agreed, because the angel looked like he was about to literally explode. Black steam was pouring out of the top of his collar and streaming from the tips of his pink ears. So much for Pulsifer as the perfect training subject. Crowley realised too late that what she’d asked Aziraphale to do was the equivalent of trying to play fetch with a starving wolf. 

“…she will pour with sweat and cry out the name of her master…”

“Hold your nose,” said Crowley. “And exhale.”

Aziraphale pinched his nose between two fingers and blew out a long breath, just as Pulsifer reached the climax of his speech “…and the name of her master is _Satan!_”

Nobody was paying attention anymore. A groan went through the crowd, strangely similar to the sound that had followed the fall of the axe in London, only this time it wasn’t so much _ohh shit_ as _ohh yes_. Pulsifer’s sermon wasn’t the only thing that had just climaxed. Crowley’s ears rang as though in the wake of an explosion. The inside of the church was thick with the smutty, sooty sparkle of Aziraphale’s exhalation, lust-black and heavily speckled with heavenly gold. It hit the back of Crowley’s sinuses and the gold seemed to explode on the back of her palate and in the depths of her brain. She barely stifled her startled moan as she experienced her second completely inappropriate orgasm in as many hours.

Aziraphale blinked wide eyes and rolled out his shoulders, twisting his neck as though he had a crick in it. “Oh, that’s much better,” he said, apparently oblivious to the sexual havoc he had just caused. People were already leaving the church in urgent pairs. Some were leaving in threes, which was interesting. “Excuse me, dear.” He got up from his chair. “I really can’t listen to any more of this silly man’s turgid smut.”

Crowley tried to speak, but the only thing that came out was a noise like _ngk_.

Her knees trembled. She watched him walk away. He moved at perhaps a faster clip than his usual contemplative pace, but other than that he gave no other indication that he had any idea about what had just happened. And perhaps he didn’t. Angels were weird.

“Madam…”

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Crowley turned to see Pulsifer standing there. They were alone in the church, and he was smiling.

She glared. He went on smiling.

“No,” said Crowley, her fried brain finally catching up with what that smile meant. Worse, there were bits of her that were extremely into it. “Are you out of your tiny fucking mind?”

Pulsifer’s smile shifted gear. It was now more of a leer. “My mind may be tiny, but I assure you that there are other parts that more than measure up.”

She looked him up and down. Her demon instincts weren’t helping, either, because they were already growling and licking their lips about the deliciously blasphemous prospect of fucking on that unblessed communion table over there. Okay, so it didn’t hold a candle to that time she’d had her brains banged out all over the sumptuous soft furnishings of the Papal Apartments, but a church was a church and the prospect of desecration always got her right in the primal reflexes. And she was curious. She’d never done well with curiosity.

Crowley glanced around the church to be sure they were alone. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s see.”

He showed her.

“Huh,” she said, surprised. “Well. Good for you.”

This was it, she thought, as she led him to the communion table. This was a new low, but she was all out of options. “Right,” she said, as she pushed him down on the table and climbed aboard. “Some ground rules. No kissing, no eye contact, no talking. I’m only doing this because I’ve exhausted every other form of masturbation known to humanity…” There were too many petticoats in the way. Crowley snapped her fingers and miracled everything off, then sank down onto the witchfinder with a sigh of relief. “…and that’s a lot, by the way, because wow, you humans are very good at masturbation.”

Pulsifer stared up at her in something like horror, awe and…oh yes…joy. Sometimes the quickest way to tarnish a soul was simply to give people what they wanted. “What are you?” he said.

“What did we say about no talking?” said Crowley, settling into a rhythm. Traces of gold tingled on her skin. It was February, but the church was as warm as the inside of an angel. “I’m a demon, you idiot. How many other women do you know with yellow snake eyes, a forked tongue and permanently erect nipples?”

“Wait…” said Pulsifer. “Does this mean I’m…damned?” 

“For this? No. You were fucked _long_ before I sat on your cock. Now shut up and make me come.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * It was at this moment that Aziraphale realised that he could get someone else to keep on top of the arduous business of keeping tabs on seventeenth century demon sightings. Crowley took several more centuries to reach the same conclusion, and both of them took almost four hundred years and an aborted attempt at Armageddon to realise that they had both been paying the exact same ‘army’ of useless nitwits.


	6. Chapter 6

The plants were a lost cause.

Crowley had known that when he got them. They were always going to slide into sybaritic laziness at the hands of a being who regularly cooed over them and told them how pretty they were, and how _well_ they were doing. But this? This was fucking ridiculous.

Aziraphale was kneeling on the living room floor, applying a milk bath to the leaves of the rubber plant. Like the thing was Cleopatra or something. He dipped cotton balls in milk and stroked them over the large, oval green leaves, murmuring away as he went. “…there. What a beautiful shiny green. It’s so nice to be pampered, isn’t it? And you’ll photosynthesise so much more efficiently now, not that you weren’t doing a marvellous job before, of course…”

The sleeves of his pale blue shirt were rolled up, baring his wrists. In another time, a heartbeat away in the grand scheme of things, those inches of bare skin would have been a surprise and a secret thrill. A flash of blue vein, thin skin and filament-fine gold hair, to be hoarded away in the lonely, crowded vault of Crowley’s hungriest memories. Only now it came attended with another thought – _I’ve seen all of you._ Every last angelic scrap of him. Every freckle and dimple, every eyelash and stretchmark and pubic hair. And now he had time to savour, to linger over a patch of bare skin, or hang around in the doorway watching the sunlight dance on the golden tips of the angel’s lashes.

“You’ll spoil them,” said Crowley, wandering over to the couch. “Not that you haven’t already.”

“It’s the most effective way to keep the dust off the leaves.”

“No, the most effective way to keep the dust off the leaves is to keep them trembling so hard that the dust can’t settle in the first place.”

Aziraphale pouted. His eyes were blue today, as though they’d given up the attempt to outdo all the lush shades of green in the living room. “I like it,” he said. “It’s relaxing.”

“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” said Crowley, and watched him sort of unfurl and flush, flowerlike in the warmth of an unexpected endearment. Aziraphale reached up to brush a stray curl from his forehead, and the sun caught the pale hairs on the back of his arm. Crowley – lovesick and delighted to be so – slithered off the couch and crawled over to where Aziraphale knelt. “Give me your hand.”

Aziraphale’s hands were as soft and perfect as his feet. Crowley kissed the palm, the thick pad of muscle at the base of the thumb. Aziraphale watched him, eyes bright with the same curiosity that had sparked Crowley’s interest in Eden, and taken him apart in minutes on that incredible afternoon when Aziraphale had decided to find out what Crowley tasted like. He shivered as Crowley’s lips moved over the fragile skin of his inner wrist, and Crowley sucked gently on the pulse point, dusty angel fingers curling over his cheekbone. And here was another celestial sound to add to Crowley’s treasured collection of angelic noises, a murmur of interest, soft as the deep-voiced gurgle of a puffed-up dove.

“Well,” said Aziraphale. “What’s got into you?”

Crowley reached for the other hand. “Nothing yet,” he said, hoping that was an offer. “Your wrists drive me mad.”

Aziraphale frowned. Not his usual frown. This particular frown – an indulgent little dip of his expressive eyebrows – was the one that came just before he surrendered to absolute _stupidity_, to giggles and nose kisses and curled toes. “You’re very peculiar,” he said, and leaned in to claim Crowley’s mouth.

“So are you.”

“I’m covered in dust and milk,” said Aziraphale, but it was only a token protest, because he was still cooing. His fingers wove into Crowley’s hair and pulled.

“Like a snake craves milk,” Crowley whispered against his lips.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just something I heard in a sermon once.”

Aziraphale pushed him down onto the rug, knocking over the bowl of cotton balls. “When did you ever sit through a sermon?”

Crowley didn’t answer, already absorbed by the taste of Aziraphale’s mouth and the eager press of his body. He could feel the solid length of him through those absurdly old-fashioned trousers, and his lust stirred and snarled quietly. Aziraphale’s hands were on his hair, pinning him to the floor and reminding him of the other ways he’d like to be pinned right now. “Let’s go to bed.”

Aziraphale nibbled his earlobe. “Why not here?”

“Yeah, I don’t really want the houseplants to see me like this. They might get ideas.”

A chuckle. A sigh, warm breath filling the inside of Crowley’s ear. Aziraphale’s weight shifted and he got to his feet. He was all tented trousers and tousled curls in the afternoon sunlight, and his smile was like a promise from Heaven. “Come on, then.” He held out a hand, helped Crowley up and led the way to the bedroom.

They landed on the bed, Crowley on top this time. He peeled off his t-shirt and Aziraphale moaned happily and pulled him down into a gluttonous kiss. “What are you going to do to me?” Aziraphale said, his fingers already at work on Crowley’s fly button. “Awful, depraved demonic things?”

“We’re still on that, are we?”

“Yes, please.”

“Want me to be the big, bad demon?”

“Mmm…”

“You want to be the fluffy little an-gel?” Crowley’s voice broke as Aziraphale’s hand pushed inside of his jeans. Aziraphale grabbed him and _growled_. “You’re not fluffy,” said Crowley. “You’re fluffy like a bear is fluffy. You’re a hungry beast with a huge appetite.”

Aziraphale licked his lips. “And are you going to poke the bear?”

“Actually, I was hoping you’d poke me.”

“Is that so?”

“I’ve been thinking about your cock all morning.” Why were there always so many _buttons_ involved in undressing an angel? Crowley had him half undressed now, shirt and waistcoat open, belly exposed. He lowered his head and kissed the soft, pointless dent of Aziraphale’s navel, then followed the trail of gold hair downwards. He’d seen him here, too, all those secret places that he hadn’t even been sure than an angel should have, but Aziraphale had them anyway, and sometimes Crowley suspected that he had even tailored them to fit. He seemed to grow thicker whenever Crowley said he liked the stretch of it, and to grow longer whenever Crowley dug his heels into Aziraphale’s arse and begged for more. Crowley kissed the velvet head, breathing in the warm smell of him, so delicious that he couldn’t resist stuffing his face. Aziraphale moaned, but the sound contained a note of protest, reminding Crowley that Aziraphale still wanted to play games.

Crowley slithered back up the bed, so that they were hip to hip and mouth to mouth. Aziraphale rutted up against him, his eager, growling moans demonstrating that he was going to be just as bad at playing the helpless victim as Crowley was at playing the wicked despoiler.

“You’re supposed to resist,” said Crowley.

“I _am_ resisting.”

“No, you’re not. You’re humping. And moaning. And pulling my hair.”

Aziraphale sighed and turned his face away, pursing his lips in what Crowley assumed was supposed to be angelic disapproval at the infernal iniquities currently being visited on his corporation. This was not going well. Crowley decided to cut to the chase and went for a tried and tested technique. He licked a wet swirl inside Aziraphale’s ear, blew on the damp skin until the angel shivered and then whispered directly into his ear. “Fuck me.”

“Oh no,” said Aziraphale. “I don’t think I can do that.”

Crowley took his weight on his elbows and peered down at him. “And why not?”

“I’m an angel. Do you know what Heaven would do to me if they found out I’d penetrated a demon?”

“Give you another medal?” said Crowley, perking up considerably at the hint that penetration might be on the menu. Aziraphale lay stiffly beneath him, some parts stiffer than others. His hands lay palm up on the pillow either side of his head. Crowley pressed down on the wrists and watched Aziraphale’s eyes light up. Interesting. Maybe this could work after all. “I could tempt you.”

“Try it. My will is steadfast. My virtue is unassailable.”

“Maybe,” said Crowley, settling in for a spot of not-very-satanic nuzzling. “But your cock’s like a fucking diamond.”

Aziraphale purred. “Do your worst, foul fiend.”

“You’re really going to make me do the psychic Dance of the Seven Veils for you, aren’t you?” said Crowley, conscious that he was still wearing far too many clothes for this. He got up from the bed and wriggled out of his jeans and socks.

“You could always say aardvark,” said Aziraphale, divesting himself of various unbuttoned layers.

“I’m not going to say aardvark. I’ve never said aardvark, except for that time in Rome when I was actually talking about an aardvark.” Crowley crawled back onto the bed. “I’ve never said aardvark and actually meant it like that, even that time when your fashion sense almost got you decapitated.”

“I do love you.”

“You’d better,” said Crowley. “Because you’ve got me now, you demanding little shit.” He pinned Aziraphale’s wrists to the pillow, enjoying the evergreen thrill of that first full skin-on-skin contact. “Now, where were we?”

“Unassailable virtue,” said Aziraphale, trying – and failing – to look like he wasn’t enjoying himself.

“Right. Yes.” Crowley rocked his hips. “Steadfast will. Somewhat belied by your…”

“…ooh…”

“…incredibly hard penis.”

Aziraphale made a pathetic attempt at a struggle. “Oh no, you mustn’t,” he said. “I’ve never…I simply don’t _do_ these kinds of things…”

“_Stop it_,” said Crowley, snapping harder than he meant to, his sudden flash borne of fear that things were about to get embarrassingly am-dram in here. Aziraphale immediately stopped squirming and stared up at him, eyes wide and dick somehow even harder than before. Perhaps for the first time, Crowley had a clear idea of what was being asked of him. And he wasn’t sure if he liked it. “I will hold you down,” he said, and Aziraphale made a low, hungry whimpering sound and tipped his head very subtly towards the side of the headboard.

There was a silk cord hanging there. Crowley wasn’t sure if it had been there all along or whether it had just recently popped into existence, but the message was clear. “Right. Um…do you want me to…?”

“Don’t _ask_. Just do it.”

“Right. Sorry.” Shit. They were so bad at this. For a second back there it had almost clicked, but now they were back to square one. Aziraphale submitted with pained patience as Crowley tied his wrists to the headboard. “Okay. Better? Now you’re helpless.”

“It would appear so,” said Aziraphale, primly fluttering his lashes in a way that had always made Crowley go especially ridiculous. “Helpless in the face of satanic frottage.”

“I fucking love you.”

“_Crowley_…”

“I know. I know. Sorry. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work, is it?”

“Be forceful, darling,” said Aziraphale. “Like when you said you were going to hold me down. Pretend I’m a houseplant.”

Crowley recoiled. “What? No! Aardvark.” He sat up, appalled, his erection collapsing in an instant. “Absolutely not.”

“It was just a suggestion.” Aziraphale tried to work himself free of his bonds. “Darling, could you please untie me? We should talk about this. I’ve clearly stepped on a nerve, haven’t I?”

“Several,” said Crowley, unfastening the knot. “‘Pretend I’m a houseplant’? If it weren’t for that conversation where we discussed killing an _actual child_, that would be the most fucked up thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“It’s all right. It’s okay. Come here. Get into bed and we can cuddle. And talk.”

Trying not to look too relieved, Crowley slipped under the duvet. What was wrong with cuddling, anyway? Aziraphale liked cuddling, or at least he’d used to, before he started getting all kinds of ideas in his head and making Crowley feel like he was trapped in that one Victoria Wood song that ended with someone being beaten on the bottom with a _Woman’s Weekly_. “I’m so sorry,” said Aziraphale. “I had no idea you with this uncomfortable with the whole thing. I would never have persisted if I’d known.”

“No, it’s not your fault. I don’t think we were doing it right anyway. Shouldn’t we have negotiated this stuff ahead of time? Isn’t that a thing that people do?”

“Ohh…” Aziraphale’s facial expression skirted perilously close to ‘Flaming sword? What flaming sword?’ “Oh, now that you mention it…”

Crowley groaned and swatted at him with a scatter cushion. “You read ahead, didn’t you? When you were doing whatever research you did into this? You just skipped over the boring parts to get to the hardcore bondage and domination.”

For once Aziraphale didn’t even try to deny it. Trust him, the one who could eat his way through a five-course dinner while quietly pining for the dessert trolley throughout. “It wasn’t exactly hardcore, Crowley.”

It wasn’t. He was right. There wasn’t even a _Woman’s Weekly_ involved, and yet Crowley – who had tempted popes back in the day – had bottled it spectacularly. What the fuck? “I know,” he said. “I was trying to get into it, but I wasn’t feeling so much as a tingle in the old demon parts.” He stared up at the ceiling, unable to believe what he was about to say. “Can you even get metaphysical erectile dysfunction?”

Aziraphale kissed his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I would never want you to do anything you want to do. Forgive me?”

“Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to forgive.”

“No, but there is. I know I can be a bit of a bull in a china shop sometimes. I have a lot of pent up…”

“Lust?”

“Yes.”

They lay there for a while, Aziraphale’s head resting on Crowley’s chest. Crowley ran his fingers through the platinum curls and tried to figure out what was going on beneath them, only to get side-tracked by what was playing out in his own head. Ugh. Pulsifer. Why did he keep _thinking_ about that, lately? If he was scrupulously honest with himself, the sex itself had been pretty good, partly because Crowley had closed his eyes and imagined it was Aziraphale, but mostly on account of the lust clouds settling on every available surface in that stripped-down church.

“This is probably unrelated,” said Crowley. “But I have to tell you something.”

Aziraphale shifted and glanced up. “What?”

“I…um…” Oh shit. How to say this? “I…I hatefucked a witchfinder.”

Aziraphale blinked across the pillows at him. “Well, that certainly does sound unrelated, yes.”

Crowley sighed. “Sixteen forty-nine,” he said. “The last time I sat through a sermon, by the way.”

It took him a moment to join the dots, but when he did, Aziraphale’s eyes widened. “Oh no. Not that Pulsifer creature?”

“Yeah. I sort of…had to.”

“What do you mean, you had to?”

"After the Incident in the church,” said Crowley. “I came down with a serious and urgent case of…well…”

“Hot pants?” said Aziraphale.

“Yeah,” said Crowley, wondering if he would ever get used to hearing Aziraphale say the words ‘hot pants.’ “Something like that.”

“This isn’t unrelated at all, is it?”

Crowley sighed again. “Oh, I don’t know. It just…it scares me, that’s all.” He sat up and drew his knees up to his chest. “I know I told you about that time I had a night job as a succubus, but the truth was I was really, really bad at it. I don’t want to go into detail, but let’s just say I got a _little_ bit too into what was going on and I might have…I _might_ have started crying at one point. And that’s all I’m prepared to say about that.”

“Of course, darling,” said Aziraphale, his hand on Crowley’s back. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“I’m just…I’m just not very good at the whole sex demon thing, okay? You know me and free will. Big fan of free will, me. And when temptation gets close to the edge of free will, that’s when I start to get uncomfortable. Even if it’s just a roleplay thing.” Crowley shook his head. Aziraphale’s hand was rubbing soothing circles on his back. “Every time I think about going full temptation on you, I keep remembering you sucking in so much lust at once that your ears steamed. You’re not exactly the most restrained when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh.”

“No,” said Aziraphale. “That’s perfectly true. Going to have to plead guilty to that one.” He leaned in closer, his arm sliding around Crowley’s naked waist. “Actually, most of that was my fault.”

“How do you mean?” Crowley turned his head and slid back down beneath the covers, relaxing enough to uncurl once more.

“I was…I was going through some things in that century,” said Aziraphale. “The sixteenth was so much fun and the seventeenth…wasn’t. And I’d just come off the back of a century where you were wandering around in tight hose for the most of it, and you know how your legs make me stupid. And I was just beginning to realise that your legs made me stupid, which I knew was something I shouldn’t be feeling, but…well…you were there. You know what the mid seventeenth century was like in England.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “Bloody awful.”

“Exactly. No plays, no pleasure, just sour faced Puritans manipulating parliament and cancelling Christmas.” Aziraphale smiled and reached out, his hand on Crowley’s cheek. “And then there was you. Even though you were wearing black like everyone else, you had such a _glitter_ about you.” His fingers twirled into Crowley’s hair. “And your hair looked like a rebel flag, like a banner hoisted by the Lord of Misrule. An invitation to _fun_. And you were always so much fun.”

Crowley pulled him closed and kissed him. “You know you’ve never looked quite as much like an angel as you did in the middle of that century?” he said, the tips of their noses touching. “You were so light and bright and smiley against the backdrop of all that black.” He basked in the glow of Aziraphale’s smile, free now to do so. “Do you remember that flash Jacobean place I had in Cheapside, with all the expensive windows? I can still see you there, with that cold winter light shining on your eyelashes, and I loved you _so_ much, Aziraphale. All I wanted to do was to take you upstairs to bed and bathe in your light. Your warmth.” His throat aching, Crowley leaned forward and kissed the happy tears that had gathered on the ends of the angel’s lashes. “It was fucking freezing that winter.”

Aziraphale gave a soft laugh. “Oh, my love. It wasn’t all him, you know.”

“What wasn’t?”

“That incident. In the church. Don’t get me wrong – Pulsifer had a monstrous amount of lust inside him, but so did I. I tried to be good. I spent so many nights praying and reading all those angry old memos about the Nephilim, reminding myself that it wasn’t allowed, but then I ended up in a bedroom in a damp part of Lancashire, watching the object of my desire having what looked like a frenzied sex dream…”

“…yeah, it was,” said Crowley.

“By the time I walked into that church I was like a bomb waiting to explode.”

“You _did_ explode. Do you know there was a baby boom in that part of the country that autumn? Not just Lancashire, either. It spread to the surrounding area. By the looks of things, they felt it as far away as Derbyshire and the Lake District.”

Aziraphale stared at him. “Stop it. Are you seriously telling me that my first orgasm caused…conceptions?”

“Wait…you _came?_”

“I think everyone did, didn’t they?” Aziraphale frowned. “Crowley, you don’t mean to tell me you didn’t notice? From the way I hurried out of that church? I was so embarrassed. Absolutely mortified.”

“_You_ were mortified? How do you think I felt? You know what I did next. Or rather who.”

“Oh dear. I’m _so_ sorry. Was it dreadful?”

Crowley shrugged. “Meh. It was sex. Sometimes you just have to scratch that itch, even when you’re not that into the person doing the scratching. You know how it is.”

“I don’t actually,” said Aziraphale, with a sudden, wonderful softness. “I’ve never had that experience.” He had that look in his eyes again, the one that Crowley once thought he’d die before seeing, but then the world didn’t end, and they didn’t die. And that night Crowley had found himself facing the full force of a look of such perfect, radiant tenderness that he thought he’d spontaneously combust in the dining room of the Ritz. It had been worth the wait.

Aziraphale snuggled in even closer, his thigh working its way between Crowley’s. When his lips found Crowley’s his kiss was slow and deliberate, teasing Crowley’s underlip with a tiny bite, a reminder that sometimes he could play rough. And yet still, whenever Crowley found himself fucked and face down, with a smacked arse, bruised hips and aching insides, he had never felt anything less than completely loved.

“Never?” he said, as Aziraphale moved on top of him, hands sweeping down over his body.

“Mmnope. I’ve been very fortunate in that regard. I’ve only ever had sex with someone I adore.” 

Crowley shivered as Aziraphale’s fingers pushed into the curls of his pubic hair. For a moment he wondered if he ought to switch things up and re-enact that centuries old sex dream, but then Aziraphale took hold of his cock, stroking in an accustomed tug, root to tip. The angel’s mouth fastened over Crowley’s nipple, sucking and licking, recalling that strange seventeenth century obsession with occult teats and the supernatural things that suckled upon them. Crowley moaned into Aziraphale’s hair, his breath speeding faster as the hand on him got quicker, slicker. He could feel Aziraphale hard against his thigh, but he couldn’t quite reach. He wriggled impatiently, dislodging a pocket of warm air beneath the duvet and offering him a whiff of the delicious slipperiness now coating his cock. Something both floral and spicy, with more than a slight odour of sanctity about it. Not for the first time, Crowley wondered if there was a file of these things somewhere in Heaven. Did they just appear? Was some bloodless angel right now gazing clueless at the records of Aziraphale’s frivolous miracles, and wondering why so many of them involved lubrication?

Aziraphale lifted his head to kiss Crowley’s lips. As he rubbed himself against Crowley’s leg he broke into another one of his repertoire of strange, horny angel noises, this time something between a hum and a purr. The sound vibrated into the kiss, spiking Crowley’s hunger and making him arch and push himself deeper into Aziraphale’s slippery fist.

“So lovely,” Aziraphale said. His voice was warm and deep. “Does my darling still want to be fucked?”

“Yes. Please. Yes.”

“I want something from you first.”

Crowley sighed. “I might have known.”

Aziraphale laughed and let him up. “Roll over,” he said, and Crowley – to his lasting shame – rolled over like a well-trained dog. And when Aziraphale tapped him lightly on the rump and said “Up,” he did so. Aziraphale pushed a pillow beneath his hips. “Down.”

“I’m not going to bark or play dead,” said Crowley. “So don’t ask. I’m not your fucking poodle.”

He felt Aziraphale’s weight settle on top of him, thick cock nuzzling into the crack of his arse. “Ah, but can you turn into a sexy lady necromancer?”

“Only if you ask nicely,” said Crowley. “And buy me dinner.”

Aziraphale’s laugh vibrated gently against his back. “Those silly stories they used to tell,” said the angel, trailing kisses between Crowley’s shoulder blades. “Witches dancing naked with the devil.” His tongue traced the length of Crowley’s spine, and Crowley lay very still. “Infernal copulations…” A kiss placed on the base of his spine. “They used to say that the devil’s chief delight was to bend over, spread his cheeks…” Aziraphale spread him open. Crowley felt the warmth of his breath and marvelled that there was anyone in this bedroom who still remembered how to breathe. “…and invite his followers to prove their devotion by kissing his arse.”

The first kiss was soft and wet, pressed against the top of his crack. Crowley felt Aziraphale’s tongue dip lower, teasing him with the very tip, and then Aziraphale kissed him. Right there. No tongue yet, but the kiss was so deliberate, so tender and so obscene that it shocked a little black flutter of shame (_bad angel, dirty angel_) out of him. Aziraphale hummed happily as he sucked it down, pushed Crowley’s thighs wider and _licked_.

On reflection, maybe there was something to the old stories about getting in touch with the Devil via analingus. Crowley’s last meeting with Satan hadn’t gone especially well, but he was suddenly seized with a strange desire to leave his former boss a voicemail, at the very least. Something in the vein of _hey, guess who’s enjoying retirement and now knows exactly what it feels like to have an angel’s tongue up his arse?_ His entire spine seemed to have turned to liquid. Aziraphale was purring again, rumbling into him, the wet sounds of his lips and tongue utterly indecent. Crowley’s held breath burst out of him in a low wailing sound, his head suddenly empty of anything but sensation and a steady, aching chant of _angel angel angel_. He pushed his hips into the pillow beneath him, silk against his cock and angel against his arse. Aziraphale’s tongue pushed, and Crowley found himself making even more weird noises, rocking his hips into the cushion.

Aziraphale slapped him lightly on the bottom. “Don’t come,” he said. “You can come when I’m inside you, and not before.”

“Why aren’t you doing the dominating?” said Crowley, as Aziraphale’s fingers replaced his tongue and pushed inside. “You’re so much better at being bossy…yes, there, _there_…oh fuck.”

“Ah. There you are,” said Aziraphale, sounding as pleased as if he’d worked out a very dirty and very specific crossword puzzle clue.* He rubbed the spot with maddening slowness, and Crowley couldn’t take it anymore.

“Please,” he said. “Please, just fuck me. Fuck me. I’m going mad.”

Aziraphale’s fingers slipped out of him, and Crowley once again felt the angel’s cock hard against the now wet crease of his arse. “And how would you like it, dear?” Aziraphale asked, even as Crowley wriggled against him and the tip nudged against the entrance. “On your back? On top?”

“Like this,” said Crowley, and Aziraphale pushed, slid. Deep. Deeper. “Like this, like this, like this…oh yes…yes.” The words poured out of him in a tumble of whispers, and as they did so he also released a small black cloud of lust and hunger. He felt Aziraphale’s breath break in a gasp against the back of his shoulder as the angel breathed in, and saw his fingers clench and twist the sheets. Aziraphale rolled his hips, teasing, _screwing_, and Crowley moaned, arching his arse to take more. Although Aziraphale was still moving with maddening slowness, Crowley knew the sounds by now, the hitch of impatience behind those measured breaths.

“Oh, my sweetness,” Aziraphale whispered, as he leaned forward, pushing deep and plastering himself against Crowley’s back. Crowley could feel the tension in his thighs, vibrating through the mattress. He was on fire to fuck, but of course they were still playing the old game. Even when Aziraphale was balls deep, Crowley had to make him feel as though he’d been talked into it.

“Fine. You win,” said Crowley, and gave him what he wanted, turning on the thin black, sticky trickle of temptation. He felt Aziraphale sway on his knees as he inhaled, and braced himself, steadying him. A stuttered curse, then Aziraphale rebalanced and lifted his hand, offering Crowley his crooked little finger.

Crowley seized on the invitation. He sucked greedily on the proffered fingertip, but today Aziraphale’s light seemed dimmer. No, not dimmer, but thinner, as if shining through a more narrow aperture than usual, a keyhole rather than a window. Rather than bursting inside him and making him come immediately, the angel’s love light seemed to suffuse Crowley’s heart and brain and balls with a steady, urgent warmth. Aziraphale was moving faster now, fucking with purposeful strokes. Crowley caught the finger between his teeth and sucked again, and this time the light bloomed bright behind his eyes and between his legs, pulling him closer to the edge but not quite over it. He let out a whine of frustration and Aziraphale gave a soft, infuriating laugh. He knew what he was doing.

“Bastard,” said Crowley. “Tease.”

Aziraphale steadied himself on both hands and pushed himself into Crowley, his teeth nipping the back of Crowley’s neck. “I’m told it can be quite pleasurable,” he said, his voice ragged and breathy. “A little bit at a time. Like a tasting menu.”

“I’ll give you a fucking tasting menu,” said Crowley, exhaling another burst of lust. Aziraphale cried out, got up on his knees and grabbed Crowley’s hips with both hands. Much better. “Yes. _There_…bang me, you bastard, oh _yes_…”

Metaphysical edging? Was that what he was into now? Not that it mattered right now, because things were getting good, loud and lewd and ball-slappy, just the way Crowley wanted them. Aziraphale finally gave up the tease and went all in, pounding so hard that the bed creaked beneath them. “Do the Thing,” Crowley begged, and Aziraphale offered his pinky finger one more time. This time he wasn’t messing about. Couldn’t mess about, because he was coming. Crowley heard it roar like a distant dam burst and Aziraphale – for once conscious that it might not be a good idea to pour heavenly light into a demon while experiencing an actual angelic orgasm – tried to withdraw his hand. Crowley grabbed him by the wrist and stuffed several more fingers into his mouth for good measure. Aziraphale swore and moaned, but he was swiftly drowned out by the psychic roar of the vast wave that Crowley was now determined to ride. At last he understood what it was that Aziraphale wanted from him, because he wanted it, too. To take it all, to drown in the pleasure that his other half’s power could give him. The wave caught him, tumbled him, tossed him until he didn’t know up from down and dark from light, and he cried out, scrambling back for a foothold in his own body. Thankfully Aziraphale was there, physically on him and in him, sensations once again grounding him as he came, for the first time or the second or the twenty-fourth: he had no idea.

Crowley collapsed face down on the bed, heart racing and limbs slack. Aziraphale gathered him up, rolled him over and wrapped him up in his arms, and Crowley lay there for a while, baffled by the sheer smallness of Aziraphale’s human body. Because the angel wasn’t small. Crowley often told himself that he didn’t remember what it was like to be an angel, but he did. It came back to him in dreams, memories of his own vastness, a being so huge that he could sculpt whole nebulae in his metaphysical hands. And the piercing, endless sight. Oh shit. He was crying again, which was embarrassing, but he couldn’t help it. For a moment back there – when he was being tossed and turned and tumbled in the force of the angel’s love – he had had the sense of being _seen_. From every imaginable angle.

Aziraphale rocked him like a child, shushing gently. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. Not when I was coming.”

“Yeah, well. You know me and Shouldn’t.” Crowley snuffled down tears and struggled to get a grip. His brain felt peculiar, like it had been lifted out of his skull, examined with terrifying thoroughness and put back with perfect care. “Just out of interest, and if it isn’t a personal question, how many eyes do you actually have?”

“Not as many as some,” said Aziraphale. “But more than two. Why? What did you see?”

“I think I saw _you_. Your true form. Or at least part of it.”

“Oh.” Just the two eyes now. Blue. That sated, bedroom blue. Big black pupils. Pale blond lashes. “And what was that like?”

“Kind of a mindfuck, actually. You’re very strange.” Crowley kissed him, smoothing the corners of his eyes with his thumbs. “And very beautiful.”

“So are you.” Aziraphale was cooing again, the tip of his nose nuzzling Crowley’s. “I love you more than anything.”

“I know. I love you, too, but we should probably…”

“…make sure that nothing is on fire. Yes.”

Crowley sat up and sniffed. No smoke. The bedroom smelled only of sex, inappropriate miracles and – weirdly – champagne. He spotted the glass of water on the bedside table. It was pale gold, and fizzing. “Oh dear. So you’re turning water into wine again?”

“It was excellent sex,” said Aziraphale, with a flash of defensiveness.

“It was.” Crowley got up. His legs agreed. You always knew you’d been properly fucked when you went to stand up and your knees couldn’t remember how they worked. He pulled on a pair of shorts and tottered into the kitchen. So far so good. His window box herbs looked nervous, but that was normal. Not like the time he’d sucked off Aziraphale against the side of the kitchen island, and the generative energy of the angel’s orgasm had caused the herbs to explode into a sudden growth spurt. That had been a mixed blessing. Crowley was always grateful for fresh basil, but the extra tarragon had been a bugger to freeze.

He went to the tap and turned it on. Just water.

Aziraphale wandered in, fluffy in his white dressing gown, glass in hand. “Quite good champagne, actually,” he said, setting the glass down on the island. His fingertips left clear patches in the condensation.

“Of course it is,” said Crowley, reaching out for a taste. “When did you ever miracle plonk, even by accident?” He breathed in the bouquet, his sense of smell – always the sharpest of his senses – stirring memories. A hotel room. Neon signs. Caramel popcorn.

“Mineral, I thought,” said Aziraphale. “A slight chalkiness. It’s very pleasant.”

“Ruinart,” said Crowley. “Nineteen sixty-nine. I remember this.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve had it before. With popcorn.”

“Popcorn? You philistine.”

“What?” said Crowley. “I was in Las Vegas. Watching Richard Nixon’s resignation speech in a hotel room. It felt like a popcorn kind of occasion.”

Aziraphale clicked his tongue and reached for the glass. “Watergate. And I suppose that was you?”

“No,” said Crowley. “Not all of it. I…helped. That was all.”

“You helped?”

“Yeah. Not much. Look, Richard Nixon wasn’t a man who needed a great deal of help from me. Just hand the man a bottle of whiskey and let his lifelong sense of resentment do the rest.”

“Let me guess,” said Aziraphale, trying to look virtuous and failing, flushed as he was from vigorously banging a demon. “You provided the whiskey?”

“I will neither confirm or deny.” Crowley stole another sip of champagne and wrapped his arms around Aziraphale. He was so lovely when he was freshly fucked, the lines on his face softer, his curls rumpled and his cheeks pink. So clean and wholesome, yet so cheerfully filthy. And there was the constant temptation, the one that had followed Crowley through the centuries. The temptation to take all that heavenly purity and make a mess of him, take him apart and leave him sticky and soiled and panting. And _grateful_. He’d always tried to hide it, but Aziraphale was always grateful to be led astray, which was one of the many things that made him so much fun. “You know, I think I’m starting to understand what it is that you want from me.”

“What’s that, darling?”

“More temptation. More power.”

Aziraphale, his arms still around Crowley’s neck, made a soft noise of self-disgust. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m being ridiculous, as usual. Why am I so desperate to explore some silly sexual fantasy when our sex life is already…well…_that_?”

“No, I get it,” said Crowley. “Permission. You want permission. Or an excuse.”

“An excuse for what?”

“An excuse to misbehave. If you’re tied up and being tempted, then you’re not wholly responsible, are you?” Aziraphale’s eyes were wide, a sign that Crowley was on the right track. He knew that owlish look well. That was the expression of an not-very self-aware angel who had just flown smack into the side of an unexpected mountain of self-revelation. “It’s like a pattern with you. You like me to talk you into things, or convince yourself I’ve talked you into things. Or at least you used to, and now you can do what you like. And I don’t think it bothers you most of the time, the things we do together, but every now and again there’s a little piece of angel that sits up straight, clutches its pearls…”

“…and breaks out in cold sweats thinking he’s going to get another strongly worded letter from Upstairs.” Aziraphale disentangled himself and sighed. “How are you so clever?”

“I’m not clever,” said Crowley. “I’m just an expert on you. I’ve been watching you pretend I talked you into things for over six thousand years. You don’t need to play that game in your head any more, angel. You’re free. You can do whatever you want.”

“I know, dear. It’s just rather dizzying sometimes. You always did have more self-control than me.”

“Well, yeah. You’re very all or nothing. You’re either telling me you don’t even like me, or accidentally setting fire to my head with the full force of your heavenly love.”

“Oh dear. I really need to learn the art of moderation, don’t I?”

“It’s not so much moderation as you needing to let it out now and again,” said Crowley. “When you go off you’re like a champagne cork. Whole lot of pressure behind it. Let yourself vent a bit more often, love. In little ways. Swear more. Drop crumbs. Fart in the bath. Slouch.” Aziraphale laughed. “Have fun breaking the piffling rules. I mean, you’re already fucking the living daylights out of a demon. How much naughtier are you going to get?”

Aziraphale’s eyes lit up. He just couldn’t help himself. “Is that a challenge?”

"I know you’ll take it as one.”

He laughed again and cuddled close. “You know me so well.” His kiss tasted of champagne. “Why don’t we open a bottle of wine and go back to bed?”

“Sounds like a plan. Any wine in particular?”

“No, you pick. I trust your palate.”

Crowley headed for the temperature controlled wine room he’d had installed in the once ramshackle book graveyard that had been Aziraphale’s old kitchen.

“Oh, Crowley?”

“Mm?”

Aziraphale paused in the kitchen doorway. “Something sweet, perhaps, now that I think of it. A nice dessert wine.” He smiled, and it was pure temptation. “Something that won’t be overpowered by the taste of Golden Syrup.”

_The End _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Human gland. Eight letters. Makes man-shaped beings say ‘fuck’ a lot when massaged.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always for reading and commenting!


End file.
